Sometimes when we say things aloud, we say things we didn’t even know that we knew. This is called compassionate speech. Sometimes we know something so deeply to be true, even when we tell ourselves it’s not, over and over again. Sometimes we take pills and diagnose ourselves with things because we are wrong, but there’s really no such thing. Sometimes we fight against ourselves with every fiber of our being. This is because we don’t want the thing to be true. It’s not so much the thing that kills us, but the fighting against it. When we stop fighting for a second, we realize we have to change in order to accomodate the thing that is true. This is scary, and this is hard. This accounts for the trembling in our bones. Change is unpredictable. You cannot know how it will go. It could be terrible, or awful, or hard. Better just to stay where you are. Better to stay where you recognize the landscape, where the scenery is familiar and the people look the same. Yes, it’s better not to change. You go on pretending, you go on living. You use every granule of your energy to keep this thing down, way low to the ground, buried underneath the soil. You keep it hidden in the middle of your guts.
The thing is like a rat. A ferret, a nutria. It possesses continuously growing incisors. It trims its teeth on your insides. You can’t tell anyone. That’s gross. It wiggles and squirms and gnaws at your intestines, like I said. It squeaks; it makes noise; you shut it up. Again and again and again. It peers at your viscera with glassy black eyes. Its whiskers tickle your stomach, you are gnawed at by its fangs. Shhhhh. Secret. Can you live knowing you are different? Can you live knowing you are not the same? I am just myself. I wish it were enough. I wish this fat furry creature would waddle away. Its hot breath seeps out of my pores in musky beads of sweat. Have you kept a secret before?
Secrets have incisors, secrets have claws. Secrets live inside your gut as you go on about your day. They eat at you until your soul is brittle like sandpaper, dry like bones. You have to keep going, you must feed the beast. Anything to get it to go to sleep. It bares its puffy gums; drool crusts on the corner of its lips. It blinks its dead black eyes and shakes its cheese fat under its mangey fur. It grunts and hobbles, its belly droops, drags onto the ground. How can I ask this creature to go away? I plead with it. I placate it with sugary sweets. Even if it leaves for a moment, it will come back, snarly and sweaty and licking the walls of your insides.
ahundredlittlestories 