My Best kept secret:
“You’re chatty” they say, I laugh nervously. No point wasting precious words to agree, I’ve already expended enough illustrating the point for free. I smile as I laugh, knowing to them it’s no insult, but they notice the absence of my trademark words.
“It’s good!” they say, “you’ve no secrets, you speak as you think” and I smile wider, nodding. I speak what I think, yes I do, but it doesn’t indicate a lack of secrets. They’ll never know the best kept secret, the one I’ve learnt to silence and stifle, the words I don’t let out.
Why would I confess, when they tell me their favourite food, that I remember it for when we next eat? Why would I say their favourite song came on in the car because I put it in the CD player when they mentioned it once. Their favourite colour shoes I gifted them? It wasn’t deliberate, none of it is. In fact, I deliberately fail at it. The shade of blue is slightly too dark, the food is a little too salty, the song is the wrong one off the right album, all deliberate.
Why would I confess that every ounce of personality shared is a treasure received; an indication of the progressive bridge of trust by which they convey the precious cargo of their character to me saying unspoken ‘here, you may know this extra piece that makes the puzzle of me’.
To gush and appreciate and acknowledge the care with which I fill the ever growing textbook of their character so that I might peruse it and write for them the perfect words would be to expose it, to pull it out from under its soft shadows into the harsh light of judgement and unintentionally say ‘watch your words, for they are recorded’ when in reality the words don’t matter, it’s the act of sharing them that carries the true message.
So I must scribe each word with care myself. Under the covers of shyness and in a shadow of concern, hoping that when I read them back to you, it is appreciated, and not scorned. That you know I mean to say ‘I cared that you told me’ and not ‘I kept tabs’, and that you won’t take an eraser to my book, and pull back the bricks of our bridge step by step until the words on torn pages in the mud are all that remains of the puzzle you once drew me.
Why would I confess that my best kept secret is you?
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