“Not that they don’t know. They do. A lot of it anyway. Just not all of it, you know? And man…” Her gaze went all the way up to the ceiling as she felt the tears yank into her. “I guess when it was just me that knew, me it was happening to… but now… it’s them too.”
“So are you more concerned that your story is going to come out or that they will be there to hear it?”
That really tugged on her tears. “They’re all going to think I’m trash.”
“I doubt that.”
However, now her grief had become animated. She nodded, sniffed, and swiped at her eyes. “No. They will. I know they will. They’ll know how stupid I was about all of it.” Shaking her head, she let the tears crumple over her. “If I could just go back,… if I could do it all over again… Why was I so stupid? It was like… It was like I was doing it to show them, to prove something, that they didn’t control me or something… And then Chris… and my dad flipped out… And I should’ve gotten out then, but I didn’t. And it just kept going and going and getting worse and worse, and then I couldn’t stop it, you know? It was like this giant snowball of lies and awfulness that I couldn’t stop no matter what I did.”
“You got caught up.”
Taylor nodded. “Yeah, but the truth is, I was doing stupid stuff even before Chris. The parties, the guys, the drinking. I kept thinking that’s just how it was, that’s what everybody was doing, and I didn’t want to be…”
“Alone.”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to be alone.” Exhaustion took over even how overwhelmed she felt. “And now, look at me, I am alone. Way to go, Taylor. Good job, girl.”
Merel nodded slowly. “It’s a weird paradox.”
“What’s that?”
“Trying to be something you’re not so you won’t be alone.”
The tears were drying a bit as Taylor tipped her head. “I don’t…?”
“We try to be the image…” Merel stopped and thought for a second. “You know, I don’t think he would mind me sharing this. Your friend Nelson told me about something his pastor friend shared with him once.”
Taylor sniffed. “Oh, yeah? What was that?”
“It was about alchemists. How alchemists believed that they could turn lead into gold by using chemistry.”
“But lead and gold are two different elements,” Taylor said, yanked off the wreck her own life was in. “They aren’t the same thing. You can’t turn one into the other.”
“Right. Exactly. And yet, because we think we are lead, we can only try to do things to make other people think we are gold. Alchemists learned that you can’t make gold from lead. You can’t make one substance into another substance. But you can recognize that the person is already gold and uncover the gold that’s already there.”
“Well, that would be nice if you were already gold in the first place.”
“What if you are?” Merel asked. “What if it’s the gold that’s real and the lead is just the illusion?”
“That’d be nice, but…”
“There’s a song called Glow in the Dark, and one line talks about how the more broken you are, the more God’s light can shine through.”
It was like a bolt of lightning had hit her square, and Taylor blinked into it. “It’s the mask.” She sat up straight. “My friend who’s an artist painted this picture of me, well, kind of, and she put all these colors on first, and then she painted this pretty but white mask over them.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Awful. I hated that mask.” Taylor puzzled for a second. “I wonder if she ever finished it. I never thought to ask.” She thought a little longer. “That mask though… putting it on, covering all the colors. It was like saying the colors in me were all wrong, like what God made me to be needed to be hidden or covered up.” That thought slid even deeper into her. “So we’re gold but we think we’re lead, so we try to cover the lead or change the lead when really all we need to do is break through the lead to see the gold that’s already there.”
Merel said nothing.
“And we feel alone because the lead tells us not to be who we really are, and so instead of being more ourselves, we put a mask over it and become even less of ourselves…”
The soft smile in Merel’s eyes held fascination.
“So if you