Sometimes when I dream, I feel like there’s someone with me. Even on this walk today. I can feel an intruder ripping through the neat files in my brain, and then analyzing them with a serious face. Making my footsteps heavy, my walking slows, and I am reminded of why I have a lead weight in my chest.

I have a secret. It’s corked inside the fragile glass bottle of my conscience, then encased in the lead weight, and finally bound by my hope to keep it in. Forever.

But, that intruder wants to sever the bonds, crack open the lead weight, smash open the bottle, and steal it. It wants to steal my secret, and to run and to scream and tell. It wants me to feel the shards of my glass conscience shred my heart into smaller fragments.
It wants me to feel.


I haven’t felt: not for a long time. The intruder wants… I want to understand. To understand passion, to be passionate, top rise above the constant whispers of my current- self whispers in the back of my head… fat, ugly, self-centered, stupid, boring…

That someone I keep in my head, I want my intruder to conquer this new found land of me, and make me happy; but, my secret binds me where I am. It is like freezing in a game of freeze tag, any move game over. And all I can do is stop and wonder why they can’t liberate me. I’ve been told I think differently. I’ve been called cruel things; things that make my current self cower in fear.
I often play empty bottles. It’s a nervous habit, and somehow, they’re comforting: empty bottles. Empty. Never caring if they’re half empty or half full. How lucky would that be, no matter what happens to you, you stay yourself. No stupid secrets that have to remain secret. If you put a weight in a bottle, the bottle will weigh more. You can still pick up the bottle, enjoy the bottle… it doesn’t care how much it weighs.
I have a wall covered in empty bottles that used to be full; they’re lined up in perfect rows ceiling to floor. When I had friends, they thought it was stupid. I drank the contents of most of the bottles by myself, making them what I wish I could become. Hoping that someday a friend might understand why the bottles meant so much.
I love my window. It is surrounded by the empty bottles. The someone and I often look out the window and contemplate the passers by. I wonder if they are happy; that someone tells me no one is. It tells me that people constantly find things wrong with their lives. That’s why people are stuck in the endless loop of pity and self-centeredness. Even though he/she is an intruder in my head, I can’t help but listen. That someone knows everything about me, or at least about my current-self. They probably even know about my former happier-self: pre-secret.
Who would have guessed words could do this to a person? I mean, first bliss and then what? I don’t know if I’d call this depression, but I know I’m sad. I know that enviably I will die more inside. Lead is poisonous. That, or when that someone steals my secret, it will hurt somebody else. I’m not sure I’m allowed to call them friends anymore. I don’t deserve them. But, someone’s bound to get hurt. If keeping the secret got me to this point, letting that someone steal it would be social suicide, no hope for recovery.
I suck at school too. Somehow all the learning goes in one ear and out the other. I can’t always read the board. Even the teacher knows there’s something wrong with me; I’m always put in the back of the class. That someone helps me sometimes. Do your homework and now! I hate that someone most. I try. I do, but the lour of the window, pulls me toward it, like humans to earth.
Some days I want to give in, let that someone run with my secret away, away. Let them scribble the secret onto a sheet of paper and pass it to the nearest by stander. Then someone will say go, and the game of freeze tag will begin again. Only this time I’ll be the tagger. I won’t have to freeze, I can be me again.
I can’t let that happen. My secret surrounded by the glass bottle of my conscience, encased in a lead weight, and is as bound to me as my own skin, is secret for a reason. And no matter how many times I imagine an attempt at stealing it, they are only illusions, dreams. I know I will hold on to the idea of my unwelcome intruder, that someone is my hope. That someone invades my dreams, and tries to steal back my sanity from myself. I have a secret. It hurts me, and someday when it’s gone I will heal.