What You Don’t Know

The people around you would be half as interesting if you knew everything about them. Why does Bjorn never talk about his mother? Where does Annika disappear to every Wednesday night? Why does Peter lose his mind every time someone says flashlight—just walks out of the room, mad? You ask and you get nothing. A shrug, subject change. Nice weather, huh.

So you write the stories yourself. Bjorn’s mother gave him up at birth. Annika’s got some secret thing on Wednesdays. Peter got beaten with flashlights as a kid. These are the only explanations that make sense.

Secrets can run deep, the kind that completely reframe someone when they surface—all the love flipping to disgust and confusion in a second. Or they’re shallow as a puddle. Annika takes a cooking class on Wednesday nights? Yawn.

But big or small, they’re just protection. From other people, from yourself. I don’t want anyone knowing I bite banana chunks off with my teeth and drop them in my cereal instead of using a knife. That I put toilet paper on every toilet seat that’s not mine because I’m convinced I’ll catch something, while my own sink at home is basically a petri dish. That I didn’t call Julia back because something about her body bothered me—something trivial I should’ve gotten past—so I just vanished.

Everything that makes you look worse, you keep. Everything that doesn’t fit the version of yourself you want to believe in gets locked away. Everybody does.

So what are you keeping?