It's another one of those gloomy days, when the simple act of blinking wets my eyes with tears I don't completely understand.

There's nothing worse than losing faith in your own heart, your own head, your own gut. Too much of my life has been spent laboring under delusions that directed me to feel content and glad and lucky. I told myself I was happy, and I repeated it and chanted it like a mantra and taught myself to believe it even when I knew it a fallacy. And now, after all those lies, I can't always tell what is true.

The simple act of yearning for contentment is emotional alchemy. It turns coal into diamonds, the bland into the exotic, the adequate into the absolute. And it turns the quest for anything into a constant question: Do we ever reach the goal, or is real happiness a mirage that gets just close enough to slip ghost-like through our grasp?

I don't know what I'm doing here, but I know I don't want to be anywhere else. I don't know who I'm here for, but I know I'm glad to see he who comes home to me. I know what's disappearing, but I know what I see. I don't know what I'm clinging to, but I know what's slipping through my fingers. I know what hurts, but I know who heals it. I also know who hurts it in the first place.

It's confusing, it's painful, and it's unending, this microscopic study of what I'm feeling and thinking; everything that felt solid turns porous and soft. And so I roll over in bed and curl into a ball and squeeze my eyes to wring out the tears, hoping they're the last of their kind, yet feeling them multiply and rain their cruel honesty onto my cheeks, the sheets, my frantic fingertips.

Life is hiding. It stings to be closed and afraid, but sometimes being open stings even more.

My private tears might be the only honest moments I have.

There's a girl at work who hates me. She thinks I said something catty and snotty about her that I would swear on a thousand Bibles I never said, and yet she persists in telling other people that I said it.

Two months have passed since last I heard that she'd been talking about this. Then, yesterday, I found out that at our finale party she turned to a guy who'd been flirting with me and said, "If you sleep with her, I'll never speak to you again."

Luckily, this was not a decision he was ever going to have to make.

But it plagues me. She's not a particularly good friend of mine, but before The Supposed Utterance and in the last month, we've been quite civil and downright fun with each other. My way of reaching out -- because I can't really betray my sources -- was to talk to her and try exhibiting good will that way, and I thought it was being reciprocated. Until now.

What kills me most here, though, is how I reacted when I heard she'd been backtalking.

I felt lonely. I felt friendless and small and young, and defenseless. I felt unsafe. I felt desperately, horribly, unlovable and alone.

She is not someone on whom I rely; far from it, we don't socialize outside work. But for some reason, when I heard what she'd been saying, my first reaction was to feel wounded; second, I disparaged myself. What did I do to become the kind of person who could be so hated? What action of mine brought this upon myself? How did I get embroiled in something so pointless and petty?

And why, WHY, does this gnaw at me the way it does? She's certainly not the cause of the crying, but the feelings this elicits just compound my overall mood.

I'm cursed with low self-esteem; I know this, and I'm making a concerted effort to work around it. I loathe that somebody who was a neutral in my life can, with a simple second-hand story, become a person who scrambles the work I've done in accepting myself and beginning to believe in my innate goodness. I want to scream when this silly person shoots me straight back to high-school and makes me want to curl up and cry at the inane betrayals of the immature.

I hate that she, of all people, made me feel lonely. I hate that she found a place I'd hidden from her.

I hate that she got to me.

There are so many reasons to cry. There are so many people who need to cry more than I do, but their eyes are dry as deserts. And here I am, letting a handful of things cloud the cheery outlook I've cultivated and nurtured, and then the tears fall and I wonder if everything is an illusion, a band-aid I've created to patch the painful holes and pretend they've healed themselves.

Plenty of good exists in my life. And yet I bury my face in the comforter to muffle the sounds and shield the shaking shoulders of a girl who's trying to lose herself because she feels so lost.

If sobbing is honesty, then the truth doesn't just hurt. It sears.