2220: Evasive Action

“What’s the most significant secret you’ve ever kept? Did the truth ever come out?”
Daily Post, February 17, 2016

To be honest, I don’t have all that many secrets. I spew most of the things that many people might keep private on this blog most days, as I figured out a while back that keeping secrets from people is a sure-fire way to lead to mistrust and awkwardness.

As such, I have to look back to my past to ponder the subject of secrets. And, I have to say, even then, I didn’t have that many in the way of significant secrets. For the teenaged me, though, no secret was more sacred than who I fancied at any given moment.

Deciding I liked someone always felt like a significant moment when I was young. It was always a conscious decision, and there was always some sort of stimulus that triggered previously dormant feelings of attraction and affection towards someone. I’ve never been someone who was solely attracted to others based on physical appearance; even as a teenager, I could appreciate how aesthetically pleasing someone might be, but I would never consider myself to like them until I had some idea of what kind of person they were.

I didn’t need to know a lot about them, mind; being shy and socially awkward from a young age, a member of the opposite sex giving me the time of day and actually talking to me without being obviously repulsed by my bad hair, bad skin and periodic outbreaks of zits was usually enough to trigger a feeling in the pit of my stomach that was both delicious and uncomfortable; I tended to think of it as the old cliche “butterflies in the stomach”, and while there was not one single instance while I was still a teenager where my feelings were requited — my first girlfriend was more a case of circumstance rather than prior attraction, but perhaps more on that another time — I secretly rather enjoyed the feeling of liking someone from afar.

This would lead to internal conflict. My feelings towards that week/month’s object of affection would grow and grow, but with them being a sacred secret to me, I wouldn’t breathe a word about them to anyone, because I’d got into my head that if anyone found out that I liked them, they’d immediately and automatically start hating me. On the few occasions where I did successfully pluck up the courage to admit to someone that I liked them “that way”, not one of them automatically started hating me, which was always a pleasant surprise, but it didn’t stop me feeling that way until… well, perhaps not ever. I’m quite insecure.

Anyway. Eventually those feelings would reach boiling point and despite them being a sacred secret, I’d have to tell someone. Not the person in question though, of course, absolutely not. No, I’d usually tell one of my friends, who would then, usually, proceed to either immediately tell the person in question or, more commonly, hijack one of my school exercise books and scrawl the name of my desired paramour across the middle pages in rather ornate, artistic text. On one particularly memorable occasion the book was returned to me with the name in question actually painted with watercolours, which I thought was rather more effort than warranted by the news that I, once again, fancied that girl I sat next to in orchestra who played the clarinet with me. Perhaps it was my friends’ own peculiar way of demonstrating their affection and support for my numerous doomed, unrequited loves.

Regardless, though, that sort of thing makes up the majority of what I’d consider to be significant secrets in my life to date. I’m not sure if I should be pleased I haven’t felt the need to keep many things secret, or a little despondent at the fact I apparently live quite a boring life…