A Secret

I cannot quite put my finger on you. What makes you different. And why it is that I want to keep you a secret.

When I was little, I used to ask my mother where we all came from. Where we were all headed. I can’t remember all of her answers now (they were different as I got older), but I can remember her telling me that maybe she or maybe me or maybe the both of us had been here before. In another life, she would tell me.

I imagined it as a dream. I used to fall asleep thinking that maybe I’d see a past version of myself, a past life, a past grownup that would become the future’s child in some strange limbo of a place where you’re not quite asleep, but not quite awake, and no one can shake you hard enough to pull you out of that fuzzy world.

The sky is so clear in Brooklyn tonight. November should be colder. I ought to be trembling and shivering on my walk home, but it’s so warm out that I slow my step a little, let myself wait at the street corner, by the curb, where all of the leaves have collected from yesterday’s thunderstorm, and for once in my miserably determined life, I actually hold onto a little bit of patience between my toes (just like I cling to the sand between my feet on the beach) as I let the cars sway back and forth in front of me and wait for the traffic light to turn from green to yellow to red.

I walk. I pass one brownstone after another, each one so heavy and dark on the inside that I almost stop my getting-to-where-I’m-going for a minute because I am caught up in wondering why so few of them don’t have any more than three windows to let the breeze in.

This November — the one that I am in right now, the one that smells like rosemary when you hold it up to your nose and then it accidentally grazes the edges of your lips — has been windier than the ones that came before it. And I wish that I could separate all the Novembers before this one from the moment that I am in right now.

I am always somewhere between then and later, wondering where I’m going and where it is that I’m coming from. Always somewhere between past and future, so that I forget to actually drop all of it and just begin to: live. Not life in yesterday or tomorrow, but to live in the date that my phone tells me when it shakes itself and me awake in the morning.

To be in the present.

But somehow, with you, I forget the before and after. And I am starting to forget myself. Or maybe it is that I am starting to finally find myself, and now I am leaving behind the person that I was before. Which one it is, I’m not sure. Which one it is, it doesn’t matter.

This is November, and it’s warm, and it has been awfully windy, and you are walking next to me in a quiet way where you are talking and yet I feel like there is part of you that is listening. Your hands don’t touch mine, and your hips aren’t marching, aren’t in stride with mine.

And yet there is something that makes me think: you and I have walked together down this road before.

When I was little, I had a hard time falling asleep.

I would lie in my bed, more awake than when I had been when I had furiously brushed my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror, absentmindedly chewing on the bristles of my toothbrush without even realizing that I had been biting down on a daydream that I was trying to gnaw straight into existence.

When I couldn’t sleep, I’d crawl out of bed and walk down the maroon-carpeted hallway to my parent’s room. I’d knock on their door and say: It’s me. I can’t sleep. My parents would wake up, open the door, and tell me: It’s okay. Drink some warm milk. Go to your room. Close your eyes. You’ll fall asleep eventually.

They were too sleepy themselves to give me a satisfactory answer. And now that I’m all grown up, I am sure that they were too sleepy themselves to tell me how to go to sleep. So they’d tell me to try, and I’d drink my warm milk, curl up under the blankets, and try to think of tomorrow or yesterday.

I’d try and think of anything but the moment and falling asleep in it.

I would count the seconds as they passed by, and listen to the clicking of the clock down the hall from my room reverberating through the walls. I’d think of next life I’d have and the life I had before the one that I was in now, and if I thought too hard about it, I’d worry that I was brand new person and that maybe I hadn’t even had a life before this one, and what if I was doing my first life all wrong by worrying about how bad I was at falling asleep, by counting minutes, by listening to the clicking of the seconds hand of the clock.

My expectation for tomorrow was a secret that I buried between the sheets, hoping that when I woke up the next day, I’d forget that it was there, that I had hidden it, and then it would be gone forever. Eventually, I’d worry myself straight into sleep. And then the next morning, I’d wake up and go through my day and then do it all over again.

We are somewhere on 14th Street and the moon is hidden behind the clouds over Manhattan tonight. You and I are waking, and it is warm, and I am not sleepy but I am counting the minutes, listening to the clicking of my heels and the sound of your step on the pavement, thinking of when it is that you will kiss me.

I wonder if you and I have walked down 14th/15th/16th before, in another life, in a dream, in a daydream, in some life before this one. I imagine what you have buried in your sheets, and what you aren’t telling me. Or what you don’t trust me enough to tell me just yet. I cannot quite put my finger on you and what makes your step seem to fall naturally in stride with mine. I cannot be sure if you and I have met before. I cannot be sure if you’ll turn and look at me and lean down to align your eyes with mine. But I am sure that it is my uncertainty and expectation of you that makes you so different.

And that is why I will keep you a secret.