My Secrets*

I was randomly browsing through the worldwideweb today, and stumbled upon this brilliant, brilliant essay, written by I think, a student from Yale: Lydia Martin. Her prose is unlike most of what I've ever come across. And right now, I'd kill to be able to write like her. She captures so beautifully what is in my heart.

So because I happen to be a graduate of law, and I don't want no copyrights claim coming at me, please note my disclaimer of what I will be quoting below. It is fully the work of Lydia Martin, including the starred title of this blogpost, and fully, all credits go to her.

Below I quote several parts of her essay that I love the most. I hope it will inspire anyone reading, like it did me. Read this while listening to Ben Jorgensen's 'Only Just a Memory'. Perfection has never felt so close to me.

"My Secrets"

"I walk off the subway. Cars, people, ambitions charge by. City thrashes without hesitation or apology. No stillness. No pause. People do not see where they are.
...

Just one second and the door closes. Eyes and ears shut. I am alone again. City melts, and questions quietly float away....With silence around, I can breathe again.

...
I flip the pages of her essay. She may pretend it is not linear, but there are still lines to be read.
...

I live only in me, and am surprised that others cannot see inside. Face wiped clean. Sweaters oversized. Everyone else tan and skin-tight. ...Our barriers are more real to me than our connections....I do not value your gossip....I refuse to play the game, and so cannot mind that you pick me last.
...
...I beam from everywhere. The happiness is shared, created by two. Smiles can now be spoken. They burst out. Forget stillness. I want to dance.

Knowledge and work and people who think like me. We were not the most popular, the most beautiful, the most likely to win. We lived inside, working to create the people we wanted to be. Against the bidding of others. And we survived.
...
Scents in my nose, swinging emotions in my gut. Lost on your ears.

A story is told as much by silence and by speech.

...
You and I are disparate. Our thoughts disagree....Even facts are false, filtered by the minds and mouths of informants.
...
Like the concentration camps he commands, in many ways he remains absent to himself.

...
I cannot be tied to others' happiness. I coil away to protect both of us. Before taught me to be on my own, and now is letting my enjoy it.
...
Maybe I am a complex web of confusion, in need of a storyteller who can figure me out.
...
But this diminishes reality. ...sewing together fragments, forgetting that the spaces between the pieces are more important than the rest.
...
Griffin, do not sew me together to create a sensible figure, worthy of understanding. You cannot capture me and keep me whole. You cannot make me frown and then tell me to smile. You cannot demand my secrets and then fill in the holes with your own. I am neither linear nor explicable.
...

Like the white spaces in an etching, such silences render form. But unlike an etching in which the whole is grasped at once the silence of a story must be understood over time.

I am a woman on the desert island, deciding to stay in the sand. I am Himmler keeping my secrets inside. I am Griffin begging for them to be heard. I am neither of them and none of you. If you were to tell my story, you would get it wrong. Don't classify my actions, nor interpret my notes. Life is known only from the inside.

No, I cannot share my secrets." - Lydia Martin, English 114: Writing Seminars 1