Masquerade

The song keeps echoing around the back of my head.  Everyone has had songs stuck in their head at some time.  But I feel this is different.  I heard the song the last night I ventured out to the theater.  But that was before I was confined to this bed.  The words never left me alone.  Each one seared my being, while the haunting melody tormented my mind.  

 

Masquerade! Stop and stare at the sea of smiles around you
Masquerade! Seething shadows breathing lies
Masquerade! You can fool any friend who ever knew you
Masquerade! Leering satyrs, peering eyes
Masquerade! Run and hide, but a face will still pursue you.

The face it speaks of has pursued me as well.  But I don't want to talk about It.  

I lie here staring at the ceiling.  People pass by my door, glancing in and talking in hushed voices in the corridor.  They don't think I can hear them.  

As if I don't already know I am dying.

I cannot sleep or eat anymore.  I can't even look my wife in the eyes.  It's not the dying.  Although that is what began my thinking.  Why does it take death to make one think?   It is the living.  Or rather the lack of living.  

In them he saw himself- all that for which he had lived- and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death.

 

Some dusty Russian wrote that.  Of course we live a deception that hides death.  No one wants to see him.  We want to pretend we will be young forever and that life will always be as pleasant as it is now.  

But to hide life?  

What is life?  I am lying on my deathbed and I know I did not live. 

But why is life, true LIFE, hidden behind  a masquerade?  What is this masquerade, this matrix we are caught up in?  And this LIFE.  What is it about this LIFE that it has to be hidden?  Who has hidden it?   And why?  How can we get so caught up in living that we forget to LIVE? 

We are so busy with this demented masquerade that we notice neither the true faces of those we dance with or the reason we are dancing.