Total Transparency
How does she do it?
This photo of the Gowanus Canal is from December 2024, and concludes my Lent retrospective. It’s Holy Week next week, baby! What does that mean to me this year? I’m just not sure.
My date is nice and I let him buy me a pilsner in a dive bar after our walk in The Garden. He’s smart in a well-read kind of way. Texting, it seemed like we had a lot in common, but it feels pretty clear to me that we don’t have the chemistry to sustain a second date. The secondary location is partially a hope we’ll find our stride.
Before meeting, he’d told me there is no such thing as showing someone yourself. Behind this mask is another mask.
It’s masks all the way down.
But as I pressed him about it over a second beer, he remained elusive. Guarded. And though he kissed me goodbye, we both ghosted.
Gabriel tells me there’s no such thing as a secret. I negate him without asking him to elaborate. I’m keeping lots of secrets. And he laughs. I laugh, too. Toss my cigarette into the street and step on it. He follows me inside. This is the good part of the night.
What counts as secret anyway?
I’m resisting the urge to look up a dictionary definition. I’m sitting with the discomfort of the unknown instead. Does telling a secret make it no longer a secret? What if you tell just one person? What about the kind of secrets that are ok to divulge in the right circumstances? What about the secrets I’ve carried around for years? Don’t tell anyone. And I’d promised.
I am tearing my secrets off like petals. He loves me.
He loves me not.
Gabriel and I are just friends.
He loves me.
I take the secret, put it in my mouth, and it tastes earthy and fresh.
He loves me not.
Outside The Garden, or more accurately, The Museum. Smoking as a preamble to the hangout: So this is just going to be… this, right?
He loves me.
I’m sure, as love sees itself in a mirror. To be loved is to be known. Sure.
To be forgiven. Of course.
I love him not, because he will not shut the fuck up though the man he is talking to is inching away, and I’m trying to break his concentration with the wave of a red joint. And the thing is that. This passion verging on steamrolling is one of the things I love about Gabriel. I love people who expand me just by secreting the knowledge inside themselves, but there is a time and a place. This party is not it. He can’t turn it off like I can. And I’d wanted to talk to the writers about writing.
Gabriel is the first person who used the word Embodied in a way that made literal a feeling I hadn’t been able to name. Or rather the absence of it. I live outside the body, not in it. As he does, in a different way. We work on our trauma from different angles, Venn diagrams that clash when they overlap. As we did the other night. I am prone to shrugging things off one too many times and reacting! You’re not letting me talk!
To unlearn a wound begins with looking it in the eye.
With no hesitation, Gabriel says: You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m being an asshole.
What is the secret here?
The secret is that:
There is no secret. (I’m hiding from myself, here in these pages.) The secret is seeping out my pores.
Only you can see the things I’m blind to. What don’t I know I don’t know? The secret slips through the cracks of the mask I’m wearing. I’ve been wearing it a long time.
I’ve been trying to take it off; I’ve been peeling the edges. But most of it won’t budge. I make big expressions with my eyebrows and lips. You can’t see them.
Later in the night. Gabriel asked, Are we good? And I said of course, or something equally sure.
And then, walking to the train, Gabriel thanked me for the experience of conflict without any sticky residue or strings (my words). I wasn’t going to tell him, but when I said we were good, I was s
till holding onto the anger. In telling me I’d played the role of Healer in his night, Gabriel allowed me to release my bad mood. But really it was the mask that did the work. See?
We’re playing a game. It’s a joy to be hidden. Did you know? Disaster, though. Not to be found. I am hiding behind this mask of letters. You pretend like what I’m telling you is true. We’re in the first person, generally. And I do try to be truthful. It’s just that what is truth? And does it differ from the Truth? And do I have the capacity to shed this mask? To be true and open and honest and transparent? People ask me how I’m so vulnerable with the writing, and the truth is that it doesn’t bother me if you know.
The secret is that I would spill anything about myself to keep you reading.
This time I got off easy.
