The boy arrives to the masquerade late. He ascends up the marble stairs alone, for he has no date, and dawns his mask as he enters. As he walks into the party, he begins to socialize with the other guests, taking careful note of what disguises they wear. He sees people wearing masks of all shapes and sizes, each portrayed in a different array of colors. These are the masks that the guests chose to wear tonight. These are the feelings that they chose to represent. The girl in the corner wears a loving mask, despite the fact that she constantly betrays her lover, and her boyfriend wears an angry mask, to try and hide how much she hurts him. But on this night, such details are lost in the grandeur of the evening; to everyone else, they are exactly as they seem on the surface.
The boy gets a glass of punch and sits by the large, stained-glass window. He stares at the guests and thinks to himself what a horrible place this room has become. After all, on this night, all the world is a lie. The people wear false faces and the conversations are facades of enjoyment. As the boy looks out the window, he realizes that the stained-glass distorts even this view: it too is a lie, warped and mutated from the truth. The boy smiles, as he always does when he is disgusted with the world around him; it is a bitter smile, one that contains no happiness but rather cruel resentment.
The boy allows his mind to wander for a bit, but then brings his focus back to the party at hand. He notices a girl shyly watching him from the corner. She wears a sad mask of all different kinds of blues, to emphasize her own depression. The boy smiles again. He knows from sheer intuition that this girl, like everything else, is a lie. She may put on a melancholy, dreary face, but in reality her life is great, and to wear such a mask is a mockery of the truth. Worse than that, even, it is selfish beyond reason. However, the boy is undeterred; there’s something about her that intrigues him. “Would you like to dance?” he asks, with a natural note of nervousness in his normally calm voice. The girl kindly obliges and the two begin to waltz. However, even as he she whispers to him how much she likes him, he sees her eyes wander to a man smoking on the deck. But the boy is not angered; rather, he tells the girl to go to him and she does so without hesitation. He wants her to be happy, but he cannot help feeling a twinge of loneliness as she walks away from him.
The boy retreats back to his seat by the window, like a wounded snake retreating into its hole. Once again, he feels the familiar sense of neglect and solitude that he has grown so accustomed to. As he wallows in his own self-pity, another girl puts her hand on his shoulder. He turns around quickly, but as he gazes upon this stranger’s beauty, he is taken aback. She wears a bright mask of cheerful yellows and greens, but it is unlike any other mask he has ever seen: it seems to replicate exactly that which it covers. The emotions that the mask shows reflect the emotions the girl honestly feels. Here is the one truth among countless lies, the single ray of sunshine that penetrated a sky of deceptive clouds, and it is a sight to behold. The boy smiles as he looks at her, but it is not his typical bitter smile - after all, even it is a lie. Instead, his smile shows genuine happiness, and the girl mirrors it with her own. “Do you want to dance?”, he asks again, this time more whole-heartedly. She nods and leads him to the dance floor, and the two dance for the rest of the night, sharing one of the most enjoyable evenings they have ever experienced.
However, the boy sees nervousness in the girl’s eyes. After all, the masquerade will only last for so long, and then the two must go their separate ways. But the boy rubs his hand through her hair reassuringly and tells her, “Distance will not break us. We will meet up again and again. If we can just be patient, it will be worth it.” The girl smiles once more and kisses him. And the boy and the girl hold each other under the beauty of the glowing moon, even long after all of the other guests have left.
