i've known you since i was ten years old. when you pass the two-decades-of-knowing-a-person mark, i feel like you think you know everything there is to know because of the sheer amount of hours in twenty years. we've lived in the same town the entire time. we went to the same college. you haven't always been the most emotionally forthcoming person, but neither have i. in some ways i think this is what has kept us close --- we were never too entangled, we never liked the same boys, and we both took what the other gave of herself without greedily demanding more.
now after all of this, i realize i never really knew you at all. that sounds melodramatic, but that's what it feels like. this one thing is just one thing, but it changes everything. i feel tricked, shut out, and betrayed. some part of that is specific to this situation, and the rest of it is a cold lance through that soft place where my deepest, most long-standing affinities lie: how well can we ever really know a person? and how well will any person ever really know me?
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i'm not sure you ever really see all of a person. maybe that's because not one of us could handle it. maybe the full truth of a person is too bright and too broken to be completely visible to just one other person. so the pieces of all of us are scattered amongst dozens and hundreds of people, and all those people together could reconstruct us, but no one person has everything.
i suppose this could be beautiful, but for some reason the thought of shredded splinters of personhood, my personhood, flung piecemeal through the world, frightens me. it frightens me today.
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i've always (subconsciously) romanticized the idea of myself as a lock and one other person on this earth as the key. i can see now that's not the case, not at all. it's more like this: i'm behind a door with 782 different locks around its frame, and there are 782 keys, and some people in my life might have, say, 6 of those keys in their possession. some might have 1. some might have 0. i'm uncomfortable with the fact that i don't necessarily have control over which person has which key...or even who gets a key in the first place. it's the most alarming thing to hear one of those locks click open when i didn't know i'd given access to it at all.
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i used to think there could be nothing more fulfilling than flinging open the door and revealing everything --- a burst of light, a rush of air, the electric transfer of knowledge and understanding. now i'm not so sure. to be honest, i just want to cry --- for the secrets we hold, for those traitorous picked locks on my door, for the deeply fragile unknowableness of us all.
2 comments:
this reminds me of an exercise we recently did in the writer's workshop. she had us brainstorm a list of alteregos we identify with. The obvious ones were woman, friend, daughter, mother, sister, etc. The more interesting were things like the jealous one, the judge, the dumped girlfriend, the child. We then picked one we thought we had something to write about and did a nonstop freewrite for 10 minutes. It was fascinating having that single point of focus. It removed this pressure to be super authentic as a writer, removed the feeling that we want to put everything we are, have been, will be into everything we ever write.
And here's what teacher said that stuck with me. We are the slices that make up the whole, and we are the whole that make up the slices.
I am a different person with Joel than I am with you. I am a different person with my sister than my mother. It's not insincere, it's just one sliver of me that best relates (healthy or not) to one sliver of them.
The key that will fit your lock, my lady, is you. You are your own locksmith. (There's a poem there).
This is a good piece of writing.
I really like this imagery, and I identify with this thought. and I've been betrayed by someone really close to me, who I thought I knew everything about. I've always thought the man I would marry would know every last side of me, but now I am not so sure I will ever meet someone who can hold all the keys, and maybe that's not the way it should be, after all.
really beautiful.
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