what my mother does not know

My mom told me today that I should think about writing, and I nearly laughed. Because Jesus, you never really know a person, do you?

We talk every day. I see her, on average, once a week, and yet she has no idea that I write.

I wanted to interrupt her and say, Well, Mama, I do write.
Actually, I have written an entire book, but you made me a perfectionist, and because of that it will never be good enough in my eyes to deserve existing anywhere beyond the confines of my laptop. It will never be perfect to me, and so it will never see the light of day.

Don’t you know I have been writing ever since I learned how?

Ever since I first bought that dollar store spiral notebook and began making feelings too large for my own body smaller by setting them onto paper, I have written. I have written when I was happy, when I was grieving, when I was angry at the world, and when I was in love with it. I have written through every version of myself I have ever been.

And somehow the woman who knows me best does not know that at all.

Maybe that is what is strangest about love: that someone can know the sound of your laugh, the cadence of your footsteps, the exact expression you make when you are trying not to cry, and still not know the most sacred parts of you. Still not know the private little things that make you who you are when no one else is watching.

Maybe no one ever really knows anyone as wholly as we like to believe they do.

So instead I just briefly agreed with her. Yeah, Mama, maybe one day, and changed the subject, because writing is made up of the most intimate parts of me, and there is still some part of me relieved to have this corner of my life separate from the rest of it.

Because once people in the real world find this, all my guards will go up. And I know once that happens, my writing will go to shit, because I can only write about the things I do not know how to say out loud.