No Cherries

Maybe you were right, silly little puddy headed boy sitting on the forest green carpet in a dim living room. An old man is snoring on a couch in an adjacent room and you are questioning me, why the masks?
Why the masks? You ask me, but you aren’t really asking, you already have an answer in mind.
You tell me I am very sad. Ha. Of course I am. That is all that I am. I am the sound you hear when you place your ear to a seashell, that gentle whoosh of nothingness that they say is the sea. When you strip me of those scary masks and paints and then tear away the pinkish flesh we are so accustomed to seeing each other in and then shred off all the layers of muscle and break the bones like glass and watch all of the vital organs explode like balloons filled with red paint punctured by an artists dart, all that is left is a silent wailing, a complete and utter sadness.
That is why I smile so much on the average day, and joke as often as I can, because on the surface I can do what in the depths I am not able to do. One is to compensate for the other. One is a scattered toe taping dance desperate to stave the other off.
One day I will not have a face to curl up into this silly grin. Silly grin will be gone, gone, down the drain, and nothing is all that I will be. A little bit of nothing that was briefly something, a something no more unique than one blade of grass is from another, a something that could be blotted out and never be missed by anybody. A replaceable little something coating an endless nothingness.
I told you that wasn’t the point. That I didn’t need to be analyzed. I was fine. I was right then, just fine, as fine as I have ever been or ever will be. Yes I am sad, but that is unimportant. The I in that phrase makes the sad completely insignificant because I am very, very, very forgettable.
I confuse you and make no sense because I don’t seem to want what you want, but of course everybody wants the same things, so what is it that’s got me all twisted up? You wonder and you guess, stabbing in the dark with your words and questions like a little oriental man pulling down the arm on a slot machine, hoping to get three cherries, hoping for the sirens and flashing lights and the sweet “ca ching” of everything you ever wanted cascading into your hands, waiting for the sigh and surrender, but you get a lemon, a cobra, and a green skull.
What the hell is this? I tell you to beat it. Off you go, and away I fly to wear my masks and be sad and embrace a philosophy that agrees that suffering is unavoidable, coming soon to an experience that is you (or in this case me). We are going to be alone you see, forever and ever, always meeting strangers and finding ways to paint them as familiar, or maybe getting shredded up by our unaccountable differences, like those blades of grass I mentioned, being chewed mercilessly by the glittering steel blades of a gas powered lawn mower.
AHHHHHHHH!
Then we’re gone, or crippled, gimping around dispensing lemons and cobras and skulls out of our mouths, the way the witches of Eastwick made folks dispense cherries, an unending supply coming from what seems like nowhere.
Cha cha cha.
You were right. I am sad. Most likely you thought that you could make me happy, like I thought I could make you happy by distracting you from your concerns when we were youngsters. That’s where you were wrong. You can not make me happy. Maybe you are capable of experience happiness. I am not. Happy is just another mask, a temporal state. I am sad all the way through. Life and death both make me want to cry. They both make me laugh.
Existence is suffering. And existence is endless.
I might as well get used to it.
Maybe I’ll learn to like it.