Perhaps A True Story, Among Other Things

She says I am her favorite, and if this is a true story, I guess I am more like her favorite secret, free to roam as far out as this blanket will allow, but rarely traversing its edges because that is where revelations begin and where troubles rear their ugly head. I tuck myself in like a child, fearing whatever it is that will wrest away from my hands what little hope I cling to. I cannot betray the light for I live where the shadows grow cold and where people's hearts turn even colder the longer they linger away from the open space. I battle this approaching tundra everyday with the kind of fading warmth that only people like me possess. Or where I am without shackles, I tread wherever my feet plant themselves. Who I am before friends and strangers could well be a shrouded pedestrian embracing this invisibility cloak with such notoriety as though the fullness of my life finds both comfort and solace in the stealth it offers. I hide in plain sight because people can hardly smell what reeks right under their nose. This secret is a camouflage I take with me wherever I go, much as it drags me wherever it pleases.

I was told before that secrets assure nothing but the sureness of not knowing your rightful place in the universe: neither here nor there, neither a yes nor a no, just forever wedged between the convenience of a denial and the sweeping certainty of an affirmation. Life will be in limbo, and everything else can be shrugged off by way of a nervous laugh, the air pushing out of my lungs carrying the trepidation born on the day I first met her, which I remember all too clearly. And although the precipice is where I am forced to thread my way, I yearn for the day when the score will be settled, my knees on the ground, my life in complete surrender, because I have finally won her over, or I have lost her entirely. The stakes are high, the risks more so, and in the language of secrets there is some grain of wisdom to be had: ignorance is bliss. Not knowing your rightful place in the universe is what allows the secret to thrive, the way air is to lungs.

There are glimmers of hope, like stray objects flashing across the sky, burning themselves in the night before they find rest in the nothingness of space. "I can make time for that," she said one day. I had to pick up my jaw from the floor. For the first time in a very long time I suddenly felt important in someone's life. I have been used to being clocked in at the very end of the day's list, like the last item on the grocery shelf patiently waiting amidst the prospect of being discarded instead. It took a while for what she said to sink into my brain, wrap around my senses, before settling in my heart. You see, none of us can make time, but it was an impossibility she was willing to make possible even if she still had a long day ahead of her, because the kind of magic that she does is neither witchcraft nor sorcery, contrary to what others have said about her. It is simply called willingness, and it is probably the most beautiful damn thing in the world.

But either way, I hold her hands tight whenever I can, wherever she will let me, because some other time in the future she will have to let go, her conviction pressed with sheer finality that there is no undoing what is about to come, her resolve as firm as her predilection in life. That day I will have finally understood that some secrets can never be made permanent, that something as obscure as what we had might have even been next to never in the first place. She will let go, taking with her our secret, never to see daylight again as if it never happened precisely because no one else knew. In its wake, a closure that will never be had, because in the eyes of others it was never us.

Then one day in my life the sun will carve out the hole where I dwell and expose my body that has been in a fetal posture for so long it might as well have the shape of forgiveness long overdue, for I have given apologies far too many to count, even for the ones that have never been my fault, because I have learned that there is too much pride to go around these days that if one could only feed on it no one would ever go hungry again. So I lower myself in the hopes that others will not have to look up to me, because I have failed many times in my pursuit of the impossible, her being the latest.

But until that day, perhaps this is a true story, perhaps not. That day I will wake up in the morning, eyes trying to ward off the sunlight, or the moonlight in the dead of the night, in full acceptance that one or the other is true.