Issue 22

Megin Jimenez

1. I needed secrets as a child. I endowed plastic trinkets with totemic significance I vowed not to reveal. The loss of them would be disastrous.
2. When we are teenagers my cousin, inspecting my fingernails, touches my thumbnail: “That’s a big white spot there. That’s a big lie you must have told!” It fills me with shame, but I don’t know what the lie is. I was obsessively good. A secret feels like the same thing as a lie.
3. Sometimes even revealing my name seems like too much. I would feel better if I could exist without the need. No one knows what to do with my name in Spanish. In English, I’m flustered, embarrassed when asked which pronunciation I prefer. I don’t want to be named. Writing seems like the cure for it, for being named. At the same time, it touches on a fear of being obscene, of revealing what I haven’t been wise enough to see.
4. As I said, I was obsessively good. The worst thing I did as a small child was lying about having done something “bad”: writing on the wall, thus implicitly accusing my more disobedient sister, who was promptly punished. I didn’t recognize lying itself, and the consequent shift of blame, as a “bad” act. Better not to lose my status as good.
5. When anyone physically approaches words I have written, any words — grocery lists, to-do lists, a word I don’t know—I protect them. I snatch the scrap of paper away, I turn the page of the notebook, I place a book on top, I hurry to minimize the screen. And then the quality of secrecy itself seems repugnant, something else to hide, to refuse to discuss. Is writing lying? What will this intimacy reveal? What I can’t see, what I can’t see about myself. That writing will be more lies. That writing is the vocation of a liar.