All My Secrets

I often forget how old I really am. I could attribute this to being a young mother but the truth is for as far back as I can remember I have felt a detachment with my age. My older than most but still young soul usually behaves by keeping me mature and useful but then something happens- maybe I say something inexcusable, my intentions rude or thoughtless-  and I am heartbreakingly reminded that I am a much younger and far less prepared lady than I believe myself to be.

Then, of course, the earth shifts and the clouds harden. The world as I imagine it is never the same. It is always less safe; more unforgiving. I become the rape victim who can’t stop looking over her shoulder; the young child pleading for attention in all the wrong ways- by slamming doors and coloring on the walls; the desperate woman trying to blend further into the background while screaming, “See me. Notice me. Love me.”

In a shockingly exquisite and reverent manner, the layers I cower behind begin melting away (I believe this is called growing). I am no longer the 80 year old sage nor am I the middle aged woman with laugh lines, looking back lovingly on her past and smiling towards her future.

More layers disintegrate and the contented housewife, who emanates confidence and is blessed with a surreal sense of intuitive practicality, has a nervous breakdown. And while she is receiving a Thorazine drip the most ethereal of creatures takes her place. She is ageless. She has mastered the art of stillness. There stands the woman at peace. I am rarely her and yet I am always her right before that last good storm- the one that floods the city and washes it all away, leaving me, naked and defenseless, nerves standing on all ends, blinking and buzzing like a half-lit neon sign outside of a sleazy bar.

Me- the writer that doesn’t write enough because she’s too busy talking herself up (the one saying “that” when she should be saying “who”); the girl who craves everything she doesn’t need and knows not of what she does.

 I am never aware of this girl until I have to be. She is a child dismayed with the world because it isn’t tied up neatly in a small corner of her mind; afraid because she can’t control it; unnerved because people are rarely as interesting as she thinks they are and nobody is ever really who they say they are. She is terrified of meeting one genuine person in this world because she just may tell them all her secrets.

 Lucky she’s good at repairing flood damage.