I think too much, but thinking is a door I cannot help but open, again and again, even knowing it leads only to corridors that collapse behind me. Beneath the thin surface of my life — the painted, polished life that smiles, nods, reassures — there is only the drop, the plunge into depths where no light has ever wandered. Something stirs there, half-formed, half-remembered, and when I lean close enough, it whispers in a voice that might be mine.

I patch myself together for the world’s gaze, arranging my features, my gestures, my words — but inside, it is different. Inside, the paint runs, the colors bleed, and the brushstrokes flail like broken limbs. I am not the painting they think they admire. I am the pallet left out too long, cracked and sticky, crawling with insects no one bothers to swat away.

Sometimes, in the narrow, shivering hallways of memory, the faces of the forgotten appear. They do not accuse. They simply watch. In the trembling candlelight, their outlines blur, and for a terrible moment, I cannot tell them apart from myself.

I tell myself I am not deformed. I repeat it, mouth dry, heart rattling its cage. But somewhere between the thought and the mouth, it curdles into a confession. We are all deformed. We are all stitched from scraps, animated by borrowed regrets, jolted upright by the lightning of other people’s hopes. Mary Shelley could have written our names long before we were born.

And yet — somehow — from the slow, grinding guilt of our existence, compassion seeps. Not cleanly. Not brightly. But it seeps, like water through the cracks of a sinking ship. If we can bear to look at what we are — if we can hold our own trembling, monstrous hands — perhaps it is enough. Perhaps that is all there ever was.