I almost told her everything, once. Maybe she isn’t my best friend, or who I would call my best friend off the top of my head, but she ‘gets’ me the most out of everyone I’ve ever known. Maybe. I’m not sure. She seems to. Do you ever really know? Do you ever really know how much people understand you… no, REALLY understand you?
But she’d been there through the majority of my misadventures, puberty-stricken years, hopeless crushes. She knew all the terrible things I’d done, she’d done, we’d done… she knew about it all, and we buried it like we buried everything else, somewhere in that dark little box in the forgotten corner of our minds. Years later we brought it back up and we laughed, at how young and stupid we once were. And (supposedly) were no longer.
Always… always, she forgave me.
Even when she didn’t understand why I’d done what I did, even when she didn’t agree with it… she forgave me.
And I thought… maybe she would understand this one. Maybe, just maybe, there was someone I could confide in… that secret I’ve been carrying around so long. And it would be “safe”… telling someone who wasn’t directly involved in it, someone who didn’t know the participants, someone who would (hopefully) understand the position I was in.
I almost told her everything. I’d told her quite a bit already, bits and pieces here and there. So she knew something was going on. She knew something was happening and it was huge. And I hovered on the very edge of that cliff… of stepping off and trusting someone, with something this huge.
Because, once you tell someone, it makes it real. And there’s no going back.
And maybe I was still hoping—praying to an absent, forgotten, ill-willed God—that it wasn’t real. That it hadn’t really happened.
And, once I told her… someone would know. Could I deal with that? The information, floating out there somewhere… leaking, seeping into everything? Tainting everything…
***
I almost told her everything, once. I started to, actually. I told her……. “I wish I could tell you something…” And she said: “It’s okay, if you think you can’t tell me, then there is a reason you think you can’t. So until you feel like you can, then don’t.”
She made it seem so simple.
……………But she made me keep my secret.
