There are moments in life when someone sees something in me that no one is ever supposed to see. My slipped mask, my naked imperfection, my exposed ax-wounds. I can’t acknowledge that they’ve seen what they shouldn’t have seen or I have to kill them. (Metaphorically)*. But I’ll never be able to not be aware of them seeing the thing they shouldn’t see that we’ll never have a conversation about.

What makes me sleep less well than I usually sleep, which is already pretty fucking awful if you didn’t know, is thinking about who else sees what they shouldn’t see who I haven’t caught out yet. I know from my millions of misinterpreted social interactions that most people don’t see much at all beyond the graffiti scrawled beautifully across my front door that’s meant to obfuscate and misdirect.

I’m not sure I would tell the desert trees the truth I keep knuckled tight to my chest even if it promised me water. I’m not sure I would let the last bastion of my most private self crumble even under the duress of a street mime following me all the way home on a dark hot Saturday night. I’m better at this game than anyone knows, so when I detect a crack in my carefully constructed subterfuge-suit it’s a code-red alarm and I start running all the way to the gutter where the game started before I reached my first decade on this planet.

Some might call this “running to ground”. I might be one of them.

This train goes nowhere. Runs through a hole in a mountain and never comes out.

Perhaps the world would be a different place if we all accepted the universal truth that an aloe vera plant requires water in order to plump up enough to provide relief for burns. You have to feed your fucking medicine if you want it to fix your ass.

I’m talking about a lot of things in order to not talk about the thing making my skin itch, making my soul scrub itself with lye and thyme, making me look over my shoulder to reassure myself that when I address the bursitis in my toe, I’m quite alone.

I’m not alone in here anymore. There has been a breach. I want to believe that if I stand super still for hours at a time and appear not to breath that the interloper into my truth will be confused and wake up from a surreal dream of self-emptying suitcases and stupid single-entendres that never end and wonder what food they ate that made them have such fucked up bad dreams? I cast spells through nightmares. It’s my only superpower. It was secret until now.

*(mostly)