Pandora's Box

As the last panel slides back home, intricate and delicate mechanisms slide, intermeshed gears of unreal engineering.
The soft click tells my ears that this metaphysical mechanism is once more whole, and that my heart is once more safely enclosed in this box for now.
This is the artifice of nineteen years; the construct that hides and protects my weakest of aspects.
With the final section in place, my heart hidden from even me by the arcane artifice of my own mind, you can finally see the outside of the box.
A geomancy of lines and colours, swirls and stains covers every side of this box, describing the complexity of my life, simple from afar, as a pointillist’s painting; easily mistaken for the tranquil life I thought I had lead in my almost nineteen years.
But don’t look closely, and thus see that the runes and symbols burned into the box’s wood.
As then you’d feel the movement of the panels as I try to find the meaning each arcane etching, then soon you too would understand the silent hurricane that burns from within the box.
Each insidious symbol a forgotten pain, a hidden mark upon my heart of events in the past that even I didn’t know the potency, or their poison.
Within each rune the shrouding ink of my own stoicism can be seen, dying each rune with the false hope of a happiness that will come when all is forgotten in the sickly sweetness of a misremembered past, and the desire for everything to just be alright for now.
As I now look closer on this puzzle box of mine, seeking out what truths I can, as I run my fingers over the metaphysical, sounding out the catches and the clasps of this arcane devising, a relic forged my past, from the many dives into the worlds that are not this one, of books and games used to distract and hide my own pain from myself.
This world with a sun so hot that my skin burns, and yet so cold that my tears even as they flow bite into my checks, to remind me of the pains I have forgotten in my past; and I know even as I write, to describe and allow this box form, that I can name the wood from which it was carved, and that ore from which its more complex components formed:
Fear.
The mind killer.
The little death in the darkness.
Even now the box guards my heart jealously from the pains I did not even know I had felt in this life, as far back as the most innocent memory; hidden beyond view by the kindest cage I have ever known, around that which I once called a masked maelstrom, a hidden hurricane.
It is neither of these.
It is my Heart.