Sometimes I feel like I’m an open book: A total open book,
like something vaguely reminiscent to Heidi Montag but with a more relaxed face
and a lot less money. I mean, it’s 2014. People post their entire lives on
social networking systems like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. They post
their Starbucks pictures, the ones with their names spelled incorrectly on the
cup. (Guilty.) They post pictures of their awesome, colorful home cooked meals,
perfectly portioned out on cheap Target flatware. (Guiltier.) They even post
pictures of their outfits of the day, just in case you happen to not see them
in public. (Obviously, still guilty but have you SEEN my clothes?)
But then sometimes, I feel like I’m not so open. I feel like
maybe I have some secrets. Weird ones that are more quirky than mysterious. For
example, I’m deathly afraid of the dark. (But I’m working on it.) I know all
the words to Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise.
(Don’t judge me, I was primarily raised to listen to the Beatles, Rosemary
Clooney, and Frank Sinatra.) One of my most favorite snacks is liverwurst on
toasted rye bread with a little bit of mayo. (Shut up, I’m like 50% German.) And
for a long time, I seriously, SERIOUSLY thought that George Clooney and I would
end up together. (It’s not all that insane. He likes dark haired women half his
age, according to one of the later issues of People Weekly that announced his
stupid engagement.
It’s just that given all this modern technology and the
propensity to be so open about virtually everything, I can’t help but wonder:
Do we all have secrets? And what determines a sufficient enough reason to hide
things.
Three may keep a
secret, if two of them are dead. –Ben Franklin
The things that really fascinate me, those things that
possess an immense amount of intrigue and excitement, are the ones I don’t
know. It’s those secrets that I have only inklings about and those things that
despite enormous amounts of research and questioning, I will probably never
know. I will never truly know what happened that night the Titanic sank. (Don’t
judge me. My dad’s a captain. I’m obsessed.) I’ll never know who Jack the
Ripper was. I’ll never know, despite all the books I’ve read and websites I’ve
surfed, who REALLY killed Kennedy.
These unknown things, these secrets, drive me absolutely
crazy. And yet, they’re my soul mates. They leave me rapt, entranced, and
bedeviled. I need to know, I need to consume all the information, I need to
fill this gap in my soul. I need to know the answers.
But somehow, at the very same time, the searching for the
unknown is a comfort. It’s like my life’s work. If I were to find out all those
mysterious unknowns, what would become of me? What would I do with my life? If
you’ve learned all there is to know, where else is left to go? What else is
left on earth to discover? Why bother living?
I thought about how
there were two types of secrets: the kind you want to keep in, and the kind you
don’t dare let out. –Ally Carter
I had this failed relationship a lot of years ago. The
details of it aren’t supremely important except for the fact that he was
heartbroken when I met him. To be honest, I know very little about what
happened between this man and his heartbreaker ex-girlfriend primarily because
he was so tightlipped about it. There was one instance where we sort of talked
about it, in his car, over a midnight sack of Wendy’s. I remember that when I
asked him what happened, he just smiled at me, turned up Bobby Valentino on the
radio and said, “One day, Ma. One day I’ll tell you. Not today. But someday.”
Needless to say, he never did. I never wanted to bring it up
again and then we eventually stopped talking.
The point is that it was his secrets, his concealed history
that kept me interested. It’s like I was always trying to figure him out
because there were just so many things I didn’t know. There were so many things
I was craving to learn. He was just too mysterious. And it was exciting,
enticing, and sometimes worrisome.
There were times that I wanted to crawl inside his brain and
live inside of it. But if that happened, if I learned all of his secrets, what
would we have left? I would know all there was to know and he’d lose all of his
sensual obscurity. His darkness would become illuminated, his mystery soon
solved.
The truth is that I would probably never know his secrets
and to be honest, as much as it ailed me, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to. In all
honesty, we all have secrets. (This is where I hear, “Hello from the cracks in
the sidewalks of New York City…”) We all have our own darkness, a deep seeded
sonnet that is incessantly lurking below the shiny plastic surface. We all have
an underlying obscurity, some more than others, that quite possibly keeps us
humble and human. It’s those things the world doesn’t know, those concealed,
far off things, which make us real.
(Like for example, did you know that long before humble,
“Honest Abe” was president, he so horribly ridiculed a colleague to the point
that said colleague challenged him to a duel? Yes, I swear to God. Because one
of my deep, dark secrets is that I am full of this just absolutely useless
information.)
But what is it that merits these deep, dark secrets be kept?
Is it all about maintaining the alluring mystery? Is it all about staying stoic
and keeping the secrets hidden as a sign of strength? Because to indulge in
emotion and talk about past transgressions exhibits weakness, and by some
standards, effeminate? Because being in touch with your feelings, open and
honest about your past and history, well, what would possibly be worse than
that?
Because today, being too open with historical accuracy and
divulging untouchable secrets can be damaging. It can lead to judgment and
propensity for people to attack your weak points. If someone knows your whole
life, they know where you’re vulnerable. (That seriously sounds like something
my dad, famously Italian and incessantly private, would say.)
But keeping secrets locked away must have to do with more
than just the hopes of saving one’s own reputation. Some best kept secrets are
meant to protect our loved ones, those individuals who expect the most of us.
The ones who shouldn’t need protection from us, but are still somehow in the
midst of our crossfire. Because there are some things best left undiscovered.
As cliché as it might sound, what they don’t know won’t hurt them.
Moral of the Crazy: I’ve heard that when you love someone,
you shouldn’t have secrets. That when someone is invested in you, they accept
your good and bad. They take your secrets and they keep them because they don’t
want to judge you, they want to know you. They don’t want to tear you down,
they want to trust you. They don’t want to destroy you, they want to be a part
of you. They want access to the secret, unsolvable part. They want to burn down
the distance between you.
Maybe these secrets just are what they are. Maybe they’re
meant to stay in private, locked in our own heads. Perhaps not imprisoned, but
not exposed either. They don’t need visitation or validation but they’re
intact, should you ever need them.
To be honest, there’s just so many things that I’ll never
know: who murdered the Black Dahlia, who really assassinated John F. Kennedy,
and did those guys really escape from Alcatraz in 1962? More intimately, who
were my parents before my sister and I were born, did my dad’s St. Bernard
really pull him out of a burning New York City apartment when he was a toddler,
did my ex-boyfriend actually love me, and does my husband really find me as
intoxicating as he allows me to believe?
I mean, I like to think so but truly, how would I ever know?
But the more I think about it, the more I don’t think I would want to. All I
know is this: I will never know. And sometimes I think, perhaps we aren’t meant
to know.
There are too many variables, too many questions, too many
holes in the riddle. And maybe we just aren’t meant to know. We will never
know. And maybe that’s the beauty in life: the unknown.
The unknown coupled with the lifelong desire to tell the
truth.
I’d learned that some
things are best kept secret. –Nicholas Sparks
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