🌀Random Reflections: Part 1.

🌀Random Reflections: Part 1.

A conversation of me.
Two poems by Eric Pollok.


poem one: The Mirror Mask.

They call it masking,
like it’s a costume you put on for a party you didn’t want to attend.
Like you get to choose the fabric, the fit,
like you can slip it off in the quiet and just be.

But mine isn’t a mask I made.
It’s a mirror.

It doesn’t hide me.
It reflects you.
It catches the tremor in your voice,
the twitch in your jaw,
the way your eyes narrow when you’re searching for a weakness.
I learn you in seconds.
Not because I want to,
but because my nervous system is an unwilling translator of every micro-expression,
every temperature change in the room,
every shift in the air pressure between your words.

You say you like when I’m easy to talk to.
You mean you like seeing yourself
on my face.

I borrow your smile,
your posture,
your vocabulary.
Your pauses become my pauses.
Your rhythm my rhythm.
Your beliefs slip into my sentences
like they’ve been mine all along.

Hyper-conforming.
The irony burns.
They call people like me “different,”
and yet I have mastered
becoming indistinguishable.

You think I’m polite,
agreeable,
warm.
I’m not.
I’m precise.
You’re not meeting me.
You’re meeting a copy of yourself
projected through the prism of my survival instincts.

And it is survival.
Every mirrored movement
is an offering to keep you calm,
to keep you safe,
to keep me safe.
Because I’ve seen what happens
when people meet the unmasked version of me.
They recoil.
They freeze me out.
They sharpen their edges
until I am all bruises.

So I learned to be
what you are.

Not what you want,
not even what you say you want
what you are.
If you carry joy, I amplify it.
If you’re bitter, I thicken my voice
to match the taste.
If you’re angry,
my words turn into teeth.

It’s like living inside
a funhouse mirror maze,
except every reflection is a stranger
and none of them are me.

You want to know the cost?

The cost is walking away from a conversation
with no idea what I think,
because I never stopped to ask.
The cost is laughing at jokes I don’t find funny,
agreeing with opinions that make me sick,
softening truths until they lose all meaning.
The cost is building an entire personality
out of borrowed parts
until I can’t find the seams anymore.

People praise me for being adaptable.
They don’t see the blood on the inside of the mask.
They don’t see the way my hands shake after,
how I sit alone in my car
trying to remember the sound of my own voice
and coming up empty.

I’ve been called a chameleon.
It’s meant as a compliment.
But a chameleon changes color to survive
in someone else’s world.
It doesn’t mean the chameleon is thriving
only that it hasn’t been eaten yet.

Sometimes I think about what it would take
to stop.

What if I let the mirror go cloudy?
What if I met you
as myself
no mimicry, no matching,
just my flat tone and too-direct questions
and my way of pacing when I’m thinking?

Would you still call me easy to be around?
Would you still invite me back?
Would you still see me as “good”?

I doubt it.
Because when I have tried
on the rare days my mask slips
the room changes.
People grow careful,
distant,
defensive.
They look at me like I’ve broken some
unwritten social contract
and they’re not sure whether to forgive me.

They can’t say what’s wrong.
They just know I feel wrong.

And maybe that’s the cruelest part.
When the mask works,
I am invisible.
When it doesn’t,
I am unbearable.

There’s no middle ground.

I’ve thought about whether this mirroring
has erased the original me.
Whether there ever was an original me.
Whether “me” is just the accumulation
of every person I’ve ever reflected.
Like shards of glass from a thousand broken mirrors
pressed into a single frame.

Sometimes I see flashes
a thought that’s too sharp to have come from someone else,
a movement my body makes when it’s alone,
a laugh that bursts out without permission.
They feel like secrets.
They feel dangerous.
They feel holy.

I keep them close.
I hide them,
not because they’re shameful,
but because they’re mine,
and mine alone.

People say, “Just be yourself.”
They have no idea how loaded that sentence is.
They don’t realize it’s not an action
but an excavation.
You can’t “just” be something
when you’ve spent a lifetime learning to bury it.

My mask is efficient.
It keeps the peace.
It keeps me alive.
But it also keeps me lonely.

Because connection built on reflection
isn’t connection at all.

I feel erased.
I feel like the ghost
of someone I might have been
if I’d been allowed to keep my own face.

I wish I could tell you
how exhausting it is to wear you
all day long.
How heavy it gets,
how it digs into the soft parts of me
until I bruise from the inside out.

But if I did,
you might look at me differently.
You might realize the me you like
isn’t me at all.
And I’m not sure
which would hurt more
losing you,
or knowing you never had me
in the first place.

So I keep the mirror polished.
I keep the mask in place.
I keep feeding back the version of you
that makes you stay.

And maybe one day,
I’ll take it off.
Maybe one day
I’ll let the real me be seen,
even if only by a few.

But for now
I am what you are.
I am who you need me to be.
I am the echo you mistake for a voice.

And if you think you know me,
look closer.
You’ll find your own face
looking back.
---
Thank you for turning,
For reading,
For listening,
For spiraling with me,
Eric.

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