you always hold it together so well, nothing ever seems to faze you,” that's what someone said and the words just hung there, a little metallic taste forming in my mouth, because for a second it transported me back to those endless stretches where holding it together was an act of raw, desperate muscle, a constant clench behind my teeth and in my stomach just to keep the cracks from showing, and the ghost of that pressure behind my eyes, the one that used to build to a splitting intensity in the corporate bathroom before I plastered the smile back on, that came back for a moment, just a fleeting physical recall, and now, it's not like that, not really, but the memory of that strain, of those particular lines of tension across my forehead and the ache behind my cheekbones from forcing the 'fine' face all day, that memory still LINGERS even though the actual experience has faded, and it’s a strange thing to feel that phantom weight, that ghost of a pull, when mostly now there's just a sense of steady ground beneath my feet, a calm I barely dared to dream of, but the implication that I'm still so good at the performance, it's a reminder of just how deep those grooves ran, those pathways of pretending, even when I'm not really pretending anymore.