This is how a secret feels.
I’m sitting on the couch trying to read, but I’m distracted by the sound of my husband consuming a cup of iced tea. It is the biggest cup you’ve ever seen and the ice somehow crunches louder than regular ice. My husband’s gulps sound like an avalanche of jello globbing down a jagged cliff mixed with the sound of God stirring the universe’s biggest pot of macaroni and cheese. As I listen to him violate that poor cup of tea, the hairs on the back of my neck stand together in unanimous revulsion.
My five-year-old comes over to give me a hug and I have to grit my teeth to keep from recoiling from her touch. I try to read my book while she watches her sight words movie, but she’s now moved to the floor and is kicking the couch at evenly-spaced intervals. Kick. Kick. Kick. With each kick, I feel the couch slip backward the distance of the width of a single carpet fiber. I feel it and I know it’s happening, because every couple of days I have to pull the couch away from the window and reset the couch legs back into their carpet grooves where they belong.
My phone buzzes with some notification from this or that social media platform. I consider throwing it into the TV. I can’t stand the TV with its aggressive noises and lights.
My shirt feels funny. It’s rubbing me under my armpit. I fiddle with the sleeve and realize the hem has flipped under; no wonder it was bugging me. I right it, but I’m still bothered. I imagine myself ripping my shirt off like the incredible hulk, scream-mouthed, wild-snarling, rigid veins bulging from my stiff, craning neck.
I’ve reached the point of desperation; I retreat to my bedroom and turn on the bathroom’s ventilation fan to block out the ordinary family sounds that carry on downstairs, noises that, to me, are intolerable chaos.
I go to bed and pull the sheets up over myself and the dog tries to jump up for a snuggle, but I hiss at him to go away. I think, If one more person or animal or thing touches me, I am going to snap. I picture myself floating naked in a sensory deprivation chamber and almost cry with longing for it.
I’m sitting here alone in my bedroom, wishing for quiet, wanting to know peace, blaming my family for never giving me a moment’s reprieve, and, just as a tear breaks over my eyelid, my husband comes in the room. He sees the tear; there’s no way I could’ve hidden it. He comes around to my side of the bed and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Babe, what’s wrong?”
I love him. I don’t want to hurt him. So I tell him I’m stressed. He thinks it’s about my writing, tells me I need to take a break, and I let him believe he understands.
But I know the truth. I know the peace I lack has nothing at all to do with my family. The pandemonium isn’t in the living room downstairs; it’s inside of me. I’m inside out so that all my delicate nerve endings, once snugly enveloped in their little casings beneath my skin, are now raw and exposed to every stimulus.
Because of the secret I carry with me.
Because… I realize I want her.
Because I am married to a man.
Because wanting her feels poisonous, abnormal, unforgivable.
This is how a secret feels.
(This author has chosen to protect her secret by posting anonymously)