Intro to Open Letter Series & Open Letter #1, to Secret

Typically, the open letter is one of protest or appeal and is addressed to a single person or group while also being meant for the public's eyes.  I'm going to twist the definition for my purposes as I begin an open letter series intended to expose my secrets; my letters will not be a means of criticism so much as a  venue for addressing personal truths.  It is my hope that these letters will not only release me from Secret's grip, thus empowering me, but will also encourage my readers to relinquish their own secrets, to face their own patchwork lives and perhaps boldly uncover the truth of who they are.

* * * * *
Secret,

You are older than mummy dust, fresher than a stranger's blood on the evening news.  You are dark as Watergate, bright as the hydrogen bomb's panoramic flash, innocuous as who ate a cookie before dinner, as dangerous as an assumption about a sanctified robe.  You're glib as the paparazzi's snap and tight as a thong on a hot day.

You are an apple, a box, The Ultimate Question.

You stir the nerves.  Truly, I'm not sure what's worse--keeping you or sharing you, knowing you through someone else or being kept from you by someone else.  You drive me crazy.  Still--

I used to love you.

Well, not exactly I guess.  I never trusted you, all wrapped up and aloof, unapologetically smug or afraid of your own shadow.

But I appreciated your smile.  (Not your shit-eating grin, but your silly, toothy crescent mouth, how your lips would part like the Red Sea for Moses, how your whispered words filled the funnel of my ear.)

Sometimes you danced inside me like raindrops on a secluded mountain lake.  We trembled together, waiting for someone to ask a question that would reveal you.

You kept me safe, I thought, all these years.  We've known each other for a long time, and despite your comings and goings, we've always managed to keep in touch.  But now I'm not so sure you're good for me.  In fact, I'm not sure you ever really kept me safe so much as you kept me from being myself.  So I'm letting you go.  It'll be slow and possibly embarrassing and maybe even painful.  Yet I know at some points I'll be laughing.  Hell, you'll laugh too.

Of course, it's going to take a lot of open letters to cut our ties.  But I know you won't mind me sharing you with the world because a significant part of you has always loved hide-and-seek (you invented it, after all!), and I suspect the reveal is almost always more electrifying than the dark space beneath the bed where dust bunnies are your only company.  So get ready to shock, to sadden, to anger, to entertain.  We'll work together until you burn out, until you're nothing but ash and the smudgy memory of unkept promises.

Let's NOT keep this between us,
Carol