PostSecret

My Post Secret:

I apologize, PostSecret.com. My secret is that I have been fabricating secrets for several years now and have been sending them to your offices with the specific intent of misleading both your organization and your loyal readership. It's something that I've been wrestling with for some time and feel that this (which will be sent to you on a postcard, possibly one of Marilyn Monroe with the eyes exed out, or maybe one with a child...in black and white...lamplit...hands over mouth, depicting: speak no evil) will be the best way to bring my ugly secret out into the open where it can no longer hurt me.
Here are just a few of my greatest hits. Remember this one?
My uncle bought me a kitten for my tenth birthday, I thought it was ugly but never told anyone. I hate cats now.
That was me.
I love cats and I never had an uncle.
How about this one?
I can't walk past a mirror without remembering I still have over 16 years of bad luck left on my tab.
Also me.
I broke a mirror only once. I was seven. I'm now 53, so by my calculations, I'm in the clear.
This one was sort of recent:
I hate skinny girls because in high school, I was of average build. I had the stomach flu and told everyone I was dealing with bulimia. A skinny girl told me I should get help. Bitch.
That one was one of my favorites. The postcard depicted those obese twins from the Guinness Book of World Records that always seem to be on tiny matching motorcycles.
It was, however, all completely fabricated, as I am not overly hateful of skinny girls, nor am I a girl myself.
Here's one from a long series of half-truths that I became obsessed with for a short time. The idea was that by only HALF misleading you, I might be less deplorable a person.
Anyway:
I bought eggs and steak yesterday at the White Hen by my house. I'm a vegan.
See, I did, indeed, buy eggs and steak the day previous to the writing of this postsecret, I am not, however, a vegan.
Here's another:
I used to be a beauty queen, but now I feel so hideously unattractive that I sometimes consider burning my face off with acid so as to justify my homeliness.
This one was sent on the back of a Courtney Love postcard.
The truth is I was once Mr. Handsome Duluth '72, but I still clean up quite nicely and consider myself to be a dashing man. I'm not crazy; I would never melt my prizewinner off.
I also experimented with some sexually charged confessions, but you never ran them. Wuz up wit dat? LOL.
Just kidding, I don't speak that way. I was actually an editor at a free boating magazine in Charleston for 25 years. It was in this depraved world of boating that I first developed my penchant for exaggeration.
Here are a few sexually charged ones:
I sometimes find men's thumbnails irresistibly erotic.
*
I believe homosexuals are less intelligent than myself.
*
In the spring of '92 I posed as a lesbian to gain entry to an otherwise pretty exclusive club. I prefer not to elaborate, even in anonymity.
*
I did ecstasy for a long while after its heyday. I now experience side effects such as wild bouts of unwarranted sobbing, caramel-scented ejaculation, and what I can only describe as "the mumbles."
*
I find my aunt sexually appealing.

In retrospect, possibly these were in poor taste. Possibly you found them unconvincing. I'll be the first to admit that I was going through a creative rough patch, but you had no way of knowing that. I could have been a pathetic, sex-starved lunatic possessed by sadness and longing for acceptance. You denied me that.
No matter.
I'm hoping we can put this all behind us, once and for all. With the publishing of this, my final postsecret, the air should be entirely cleared, for what are we if not civilized fellow human beings.
I know that in light of my deception, some of the folks in your office might not want to run this postcard. To those people I say this:

I was once ashamed of myself, so I sent a postcard.

For Your Eyes Only

Dear The Future,
By the time you read this it will already be too late. I will have already flown the coop, like a frustrated cupid. Don't try tracking me down either; whatever happened between us, it's all The Past's problem now.
I've met another, I'm not sorry to say. Her name is The Here, Now. Although the allure of your promises, broken, half-met, or just plain forgotten about, will always tug at me ( mostly in the dim-lit house of imagination, which was where your seductions were most successful) The Here, Now makes no promises nor excuses, justifications. She is content to accept me as I am, which, in the end is all a dream-drunk douche bag like me could ever want.

Yours no longer,
Marty McFly

Hallways

A hallway stretching before you, if it leads to a window overlooking nothing but sky: The illusion is of being in the chamber of 007's gun.
The white square of sky could hold broken glass for a moment, the way a gun's barrel coughs smoke.
In a hallway, leading to a window, overlooking nothing but sky, you're always an explosion of glass away from being a bullet.

Clown

Maybe I'll be a clown. A smelly old clown. Not bad smelly though. Maybe I'll be the clown that begs for change on the street, but I won't BEG, I'll simply suggest. And I'll smell wonderful. I haven't decided whether I'll smell like food or flowers. Maybe I'll smell like meatloaf and petunias, but why stop there? I could also smell like the linen table cloth, freshly washed. And I'd smell like the silverware, and the lemon fresh dish soap used to wash the silverware. And I'd smell like the heat of the water used to kill the germs on the silverware. Really, I'd smell like an entire dinner. Like all the people in the restaurant. I'd smell like the German Boutique owner on his first date since his wife divorced him last year. I'd smell like a waiter's pants, which smell like the waiter's St. Bernard. I'd be a clown that smells like the struggle in people's throats not to sob openly. I'd be the scent of shirked cowardice. I'd be arthritic pains hidden for years so as to keep working to put my last child through college. People would pass me and be reminded of these things, they'd stop momentarily and smell a hamburger, or a basket of rose petals, or their own saliva on the neck of a former lover, or the world series, or trampled grass and goose shit, orange rinds, the sea's salt, a burnt hot dog, mothballs. They would stop, and then I'd kindly suggest a donation. Maybe you could spare some change? And they'd see my face, painted into a permanent smile, and they'd see my clothes, silky and multicolored, and they'd smell me and be reminded of something they never thought they forgot. People would give money to this sort of clown don't you think?