All of yous with your pinkish hues, your gun happy nerves, and your bubblegum syndromes are now invited.

So the audit party is over. Three of them auditors hit us Monday through Thursday. We did fine. It’s funny how you act differently when you know somebody’s watching; how you tend to pick your words, lock your screen, empty your drawers, keep your keys in your pocket, squeeze all the diseased blood into your heart so they couldn’t see it, and leave all the pending work back home. To them, we were clean. It was a hectic week. One wrong word and we would have been screwed big time, enough for them to shut down the branch where I work.

Nevertheless, we passed ingloriously.

Now that I’m off the hook professionally, all I have is time to put my pieces back together. It is a challenge that I’ve had to endure over and over again. But I know myself. I know that nobody sees my inside and hence not getting me, not knowing me, not feeling me, has always served me right even if that has always been the cause of creating a barrier between me and the people I love. They don’t know me enough to see my scars mended by infectious demons of my own creation. Let it rot inside. To my peers, friends, family, and world… I look fine. I am something else, indeed.

This morning I tried to create a list of things to do. I used the same little book I used while preparing my last trip. I put down the number 1 that remains lonely still with no words to fill its void. All I know is that, no matter how long it takes, I will be fine. In the meantime, to the rest of my world, I’m still the same ol’ me with my ugly habits and my familiar eyes… and that’s fine for now. My personal battles are my own and have always been so.

Where everybody’s got a big, white whale to catch, mine has always been transparent, far away from colors that reflect back into my brain. For now I’ll stand my ground in public and lay back when I’m by myself… right here… in search for things that make sense to me, that drive me into becoming, into being me without the fear of being misunderstood.

If only I had eternity. If only I owned time back and forth, maybe then I would have found my white whale and watched it swim free into the tranquil vagueness of its domain.

What if I never find it? What if I was that whale after all?

What if… my whale has already swallowed me, asked the petrified senselessness.

At least I’ll spend my life wrinkling, knowing that I tried.