Short story: You live a lie

You hide your true identity.
Your friends think they know you, but they don't. 
Your parents think that there isn't more to know about you, but they don't know. 
You kid thinks you're an entire universe in yourself, but you live a a parallel reality on the side.

Your colleges think you're unexposed, plain, self obsessed, cocooned.

But what they don't know is - you aren't.  

You beat women on the side.
You lie to your wife and while you wear her name around your ring finger,

You have the courage to cress someone else with that very same hand.
The same lips you use to kiss you young one, you use for purposes much beyond dirty words.

 

When you take off your clothes at night, you don't take off the pretense.

Never exposing your scars and ugly skin to your own life. 

Never at easy, fearing prying eyes. 

You only take that off in private.
But privet is never really on your own,
Never in the confinement of small rooms that suffocate your soul,  

Always in the presence of another being you delude and call your one true love.

Little do you have the guts to even look at yourself in the mirror 

To acknowledge that there's not been one but a series of such strangers.

Who you put down I in private.
Who you torture behind closed doors.
Who you hurt with all your strength, both physical and emotionally.

 
You've created monsters with void pasts. 

Their own reality and history diluted by your words.
Who are cruel to themselves and who ache to pain at your hands. 
On the outside no one will ever be able to see this person.
On the outside no one will ever know those strangers.

Those few quiet woman, fragile flowers silently writhing at your hands.  

You hide your true identity... 
Your friends think they know you, but they don't..
But i do. 

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.  -  Charles Dickens 

"No regrets" generation.

You date so much that then it doesn't matter. The concept of being someone's first or being someone's last has become diminishingly insignificant over the decades. How we look or they looked, what they did, how we acted, all seems fine to us. In that moment when we were happy we were ok so we don't look back to ever say "oh god! Look at who I was or who I was with!" Ever.

That, simply because we regret less, we're wiser, we learn from our mistakes (or maybe not) but we defiantly seem to want to make a lot of them for our own 'good'. But we're happier with ourselves, we judge less and don't care about others opinions as much as our own. We carve out our own personal identity and have no fear or hesitation in putting it out there for the world.

We believe in fate and destiny even if our view is very broken or skewed. But who says the meaning shouldn't have changed over years? Hence sometimes they go unnoticed or unappreciated by the previous generation but we do know better. And let me refocus, 'we're happier'.

We actively engage in discussions about and give more time to understanding the difference between then and now in context to ourselves yesterday and today and then between out generation and the previous. Which is a good thing, cause while we recollect, we don't nestle. We're ok with outcomes and just fine with where we end up. Hopeful for better, but just fine. We don't think much of the future like our previous counterparts. We know it'll be different but as far as personal human dynamics go, we have stopped making assumptions. We know we're moving at a much higher speed than someone in our shoes even just a decade ago and hence were ok with comparison with the past, with what has already existed than assume about the future. 

As shallow or empty the words "No regrets" may sound, it makes perfect sense to us. To us it means giving everything sufficient chances and enough heart that when we look back to it from the future we never wish we could have done anything better or left out any scope of effort we didn't put in to think maybe we lacked somewhere.

We're far more dynamic and adjusting and calmer and open about our wants, desires and the way we intend to bond with people and places we wont wait for the rest of our lives to see, time we can put aside or even the amount of risk we can readily take for all kinds of things important to us.