“They’ve got me all wrong,” she said wearily. Her words were accompanied with a soft smile and a slow sigh, but it was a good-natured sigh, one that was singed with happy memories of which she alone knew. Her weathered hands clutched the edges of the rocking chair, holding on for dear life. The creak of the curved wood against the ground was oddly comforting.
“They’ve read my books and they’ve interviewed what’s left of my friends and they’ve even ransacked my house, but those are just pieces of a huge puzzle that they know nothing about. They’ve tried to construct my entire being out of hospital records and certificates and strings of words tied together in sentences, but they’ll never truly fill in all of the parts. What they have is an outline filled with nothing but air, a skeleton of my meaty life. “They’ll never know.” Here she looked up into the sky, her eyes tracing the clouds that she had described so many times in her poetry.
“They’ll never know that, on the day my father died, I ran for two hours straight; I ended up eleven miles from my house. They’ll never know that I loved my second husband more than I loved my first. They’ll never know that my favorite fruit is oranges because they remind me of the lots we used to buy our Christmas trees from. Do you know why?” She slowly brought her gaze down from the sky and looked me in the eyes.
“It’s because I never wrote them down. These are secrets I kept just for the sake of keeping. It’s hard to have secrets when you’re a writer, because, as a writer, you’re only good when you’re thinking. You must continually think deep, introspective thoughts that no one else has ever thought before. And when you discover something substantial and halfway interesting deep in the concaves of your mind, you write it down and you tidy it up and you ship it off to be published and you get paid to write down thoughts, both pretty and horrid. Your sinful desires can be masked in character development and nice poetry, but no matter how you try to conceal it, all of your dirty characters and stories came from the creases in your brain. Do you understand?”
I nodded, because to speak would put a rift in her magnificent speech, and I didn’t know if either of us would be able to recover from such an interruption.
“They’ll never know,” she repeated once more, her smile now covering her entire face. “They’ll never know.”