I carry secrets just under my skin.
They live under my collarbone and sit there pooling and building and sometimes they disappear into my bloodstream never to be seen or remembered again.
The secrets that I carry are not always about my life, but they are mine nonetheless. They are heavy and weigh on my chest and tell me just how lucky I am that people trust me.
I have the kind of face that says “I am harmless.”
I am not sure how much I love that.
As a kid I played hide and seek and I treat my secrets like that.
I tuck them behind my rib cage, squish them in between my lungs, hide them in my curly hair and hope that they are never found, while balanced precariously on ringlets they are somehow never seen again.
I was always good at hide-and-seek when I was younger, less so now.
I think it has something to do with how much confidence I had then—less of a fear of falling, a fear of injuring myself. I tucked myself on thin tree limbs and used gutters to pull myself onto rooftops.
My favorite hiding spot was in the rafters of the porch, and to get there was always a challenge.
We’d play in the dead of night and I’d always been ready, thinking through my careful steps and exactly how I was going to get there. I balanced on the handrail, pulling myself onto it with barely-present grip strength, and then I’d pause. Look closely at the world around me and watch carefully for any sign that the seeker was close to finding me.
Thinking back on it, all I can remember is how thin the handrail was, how high up I was, the color of the concrete on the other side of the handrail.
I’d use my legs to pull myself into the rafters, relying on the strength of swim team and breathing heavily the moment I was balanced.
I think the longest I ever hid there was an hour, it always felt longer.
My secrets are like that, stuck precariously between the rafters of normal conversation. They curl in between the beams of every sentence I mutter and wait in the silence after the period.
The longest secret I’ve ever kept is nineteen years old and I don’t remember all of the details.
Playing hide and seek with my secrets is easy—if I hide them as well as I did when I was a kid, then no one will ever ask me about them.
I can be less of a risk of sharing if I am hidden.
So, I will play hide-and-seek.
And all of my secrets I will keep.
I will continue to allow the secrets to pool and learn to accept the face that lets me be so trustworthy.
My secrets are safe with me.