Keeper of Secrets
She doesn’t know how I can do it, she says: she thinks if she was me she’d burst. But I’m secretive anyway, I say, I have a hard enough time telling my secrets, far less anyone else’s. I tell you in the end, I say, and she says yes, little bits. It’s part of what our friendship is based on, though: my ability to keep silent until she tells me, and the little jewels I pass to her when she can’t respond, or ask for more. Where would we be if I couldn’t second guess her, and she didn’t think I was deep?
I am a keeper of secrets. Not so much my own, though I hold them close until such time as I am willing for them to be discussed, but other people’s. I see the inside of my head as a repository, into which others’ secrets fall with a little rustle, and pile up in little heaps of torn up paper. I piece them together, and wait patiently for the next bit, and sometimes paint over the gaps with speculation, and often I am right.
They aren’t mine to give away, these secrets, they are mine to hoard and keep. There are stories that are mine, of course, but I can only tell my side, because the other part of the story is someone else’s, and to tell theirs too, to tell it in such a way that it would be fair to them, would be to give too much away. I can’t hold out my hand and expect for trust to be placed into it, and to truss up that trust to say or write what would betray what someone else told me believing that I would keep it close. There are things that have no place to be heard outside the bedroom where they were whispered; there are things that are said that are an act of love, of faith, when they are entrusted into another’s safekeeping. Intimacy isn’t the baring of flesh and the exchange of fluids, it’s the passing from one hand to another of crumpled scraps of paper (this is the worst of me: make the best of it; these are the dregs: intoxicate yourself).
I keep the secrets of others’ safe, and it’s a hard habit to break, even with my own. I’m a puritan at heart: I’d rather the forbidden glimpse of darkness than the full-frontal with the lights on. I like the slow drip of unconscious confidences and backhanded revelations to colour the sketch I have in my head; I like what I must work at to reveal rather than being handed something on a plate. It is what we hide that defines us, in some sense, and the glimpse through the cracks tantalizes, while the trust that is conferred by the door thrown open seduces.
I can use it, but I can’t write it, what I see or what I’m shown. It’s not only mememe in my head, but that’s the only story I have to tell. The negotiations, tribulations, the slow slide forward and the leap into the dark are as sacred as pillow talk – but the real sort, not the pleasantries: the defenseless soul-baring. And more than that, I’m selfish. I never share the things I truly value, or put them on display. I couldn’t do it if I wanted to. I don’t have the words.
