You eviscerate before an invisible audience. For them you provide a forum on the sordid actions of your pain and then you wait for the sympathetic witnesses to gather round your muted and lonely heart.

You know they're there; sometimes they talk to you. Sometimes it even feels like you're at the center, prized like a little girl dressed in oversized glamour. But most of them just gawk and the loneliness never goes in any case.

Then what good is this passive entreaty? If you could approach that frightened heart you would recognize that the unseeable audience both denies and illuminates the promise of your dream savior.

Instead you try to hook a few of them, pull them through the mirror to stand there beside you and your trunk of guises.

What could the human ones say but how beautiful and important you are in your ill-fitting gown? And what else would they say to the next charade and the one after that?

The truth is you wield your illness like a loaded gun, coercing pity from fear and human kindness: You hold yourself hostage and wait for one of the silent ones to emerge from the ether to rescue you.

Is that how you want to be loved?