An Open Secret

Gone are my faint faltering sentences, yours is a story I tell with deliberation, my eyes turned resolutely away from my confidant as if you were a falsehood and my words a signboard artist nailing letters of fraudulent promise in straight effortless lines.

Maybe you should have stayed bitten back, sulking in the corners of my lips but utterance is irresistible. I delight in you as much as in a beautiful word that swims into speech unthinkingly and fits into sentences perfectly with the self-possession of rhyming poetry. I delight in you as I do in wisdom that is hoarded for long and in silence like a breath and then wasted in a solitary scream against the injustice that pitts the invisible flower against a yet unopened one. I delight in you as freely as my despotic impulse for truth stops my words short and curves my mouth into a smile of defeat.

I used to take an uneasy pride in concealment, uneasy because it drips like a tear down the cheeks of a weeping child in the midst of an insensible throng. Uneasy because it reddens like a face that has passed notice under an unsmiling unseeing friend. Uneasy because long silences don’t flutter like standards that cut through battle lines.

At the end, I say “Don’t tell anybody.” And I know that the lamp has been rubbed and the genie summoned and that veils can’t buy you beauty any longer.