There are some secrets that shouldn’t be blurted out in times new roman and be published now, recorded forever on the web. There are some that are soft and muffled, that should be whispered into powdery earth gleaming with earthworms, or scratched with lilac ink on yellowed parchment and buried in the eaves of an abandoned house, bricked up against the air.
Sometimes I read blogs and then the related blogs and the comments and it’s like being hit in the face with a left hook of rape and a right of child abuse and a jabbing cut of divorce and I am bruised and battered yet reel on my feet and suck on half an orange for more. Ambulance chasing from the comfort of my room and I think, I would never do that, never share that saphenous vein. I don’t even go to the gym, all those people sweating in front of strangers is unseemly to me. In the palace in Copenhagen I once wandered the exercise room of a long-dead princess, where she would dance physical jerks every morning, using strange rubber bands that now dangle like thick 50s stockings on the line; and no one, not the smallest scullery mouse, was allowed to see her until she had bathed and powdered.
I see the need for confession: I converted from nothing to Catholicism a few years ago, and maybe that's why, to escape the harsh blue lighting of a life with no priests and no wise women and fading family ties. But the web isn’t the answer. If you confess to the web it responds, it files, it shares - and all this after it forces you to tell all in clean spaces and staggered words and thought and rigidity. Even PostSecret is a forum, an art. 298 million hits! I don’t want 298 million people to know my secret. I just want to be able to whisper it into air, to set it free from within my heart and get it – out.
Teenage babysitting and I used to confess to get them to sleep, whispering about how I hated Helen Grant at school in words they didn't understand while Disney blared. But the addiction started on hospital visiting, when my dad waved me away so he could hold his own dad as they cried, and me stumbling away and there he was, the most beautiful young man, carcrash coma. And I pressed my cheek against his and told him everything.
And now, now there is you.
"Things I would not tell anyone, I tell the public."
- Michel de Montaigne
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rosy-Crucifixion-Plexus-Travellers-Companion/dp/1596541113/
Good to see you back.
Posted by: Chris | 11 January 2010 at 08:11