July 28, 2005
Dear [________]
I'm willing to bet that you've never seen the website www.postsecret.com. It's an address where people send secrets written on the back of postcards. The website is a collection of photographs of those postcards. It's mesmerizing and wonderful and sad and lovely. I've been looking at it a lot lately.
And I've been thinking about my secret, what I would write on a postcard, and how it would feel to tell it. My secret is about you.
I was in your house one time, years ago. You weren't there, and I was looking for some paper to write a letter. I found a spiral bound Mead notebook in a drawer of odds and ends and opened it up toward the middle, looking for a blank page. I saw right away it was your journal -- I hadn't known you kept one -- and I didn't put it down. No, I read it. Not too much, I was too guilty for that, plus you might have been coming back shortly, but I read a few pages, marvelling at your inner world.
And here's the thing. What I read in that journal was more complicated and discerning than I had realized you were. You were writing about something hard, turning it over on the pages, writing about your own struggle to make sense of it and suddenly I saw the subject -- and you -- in a whole new way. I saw your intellect and your heart and I admired you more, and differently, than I ever had. I had a glimpse of your mind. But I stole that glimpse, it was your private world, and I was ashamed of myself for stealing it. I've pretended for years that I don't know who you really are. No, this is worse. I've pretended not to be interested.
We know each other, but not well, and I'm ashamed because I think that's my fault. I have these layers of shame and gratitude that I can't separate. I want to be ashamed for reading your inner thoughts and part of me desperately is, but part of me is grateful, too, for the little glimpse of you I got. I'm ashamed that I don't know how to get there through conversation.
Yours,
Scheherazade
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