Just Clearing My Head

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Thursday, February 16, 2006

These Games of Secrecy

That prickly feeling of heat and downgoing from the top of your shoulder blades to the pit of your stomach, nervous hairs standing at attention on the back of your neck, the sensation that means an unalterable slip up has been made. Someone (you) left the cats out over the weekend and now the neighbor is back from his vacation and you have to explain where Socks and Fluffmuffin are. You stand motionless in the middle of the floor, daring not even to breathe. What you want to do is escape and start over with new neighbors, new cats. And the realization for me is sad because I know that what I want to run from is just the truth, which has this pesky way of following one around.

Truth is what it wants to be and never what you try and make it. I think of all of the problems boiled down into an easily definable point, winnowed into some simple and easily digestible tablet, and what I come up with is what Anne said once so many years ago. “Most of the time when I ask you a question it’s only so that you’ll ask it in return.” You assume that when someone tells you that they’ve always been an observer that they’ll really actually listen to you. And then you have no idea really how to react when their eyes drift away during conversation, or ten minutes after you’ve spoken with them they ask you something that you had elucidated during said conversation. Does anyone really think they’re not that transparent? I am a flounder, dear god but how I writhe with the unsaid.

And then the third realization. The hard exterior has been excoriated away in secret, and for how long? How long has he known about the soft and weak and weary underneath, how long and done nothing? Can anyone really be that unable to give an inch? Can anyone really be that selfish?

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