When I was in my tweens, I think, I broke my leg for the first time. Skateboarding injury. Launch ramp, poorly constructed, meets young virile body, well constructed, equals broken leg, deconstructed. This was the beginning, I suppose, of a life of the mind. Is the life of the mind about secrecy and suspicion? The mystery is generally a tawdry genre.
My investigations first took me into the closet of my father's bedroom, where on the shelf I found old books, he'd purchased when. My parents were divorced then. Photographic erotica, adorned with the drawing of a woman's public hair between tightly shut legs. Funny books, I think in retrospect. My Secret Garden. Ribbons of my cum needing to be cleaned off of my clothes, other surfaces.
Curiousity eventually discovered a journal. I knew no boundaries and the private self meant merely that it had not yet been uncovered. My father's journal (my father, a minister) told me that he had met women at these summer retreats he'd gone to, when my mother, sister and I went to a family camp, without him. He slept with these women. Names that now sound funny. But they are merely the names of women from a generation older than mine. My father never gave many details. Which is probably best. But he was an adulterer, clearly.
Now I retell his story. My story is much better. I have exhausted the anxiety of influence. I am not a minister, so my story lacks the sense of public scandal. But my brashness makes up for his stupidity, his failure with words, his poor handwriting.
He left the journal underneath the coffeetable in the living room of the house that he lived in alone, now that we had left him. But my sister and I still visited him. How could he have overlooked that potential for disaster? I at least use pseudonyms and immediately delete the history of my browser. I've told none of my conquests the address of this journal (although I've told many of them about it) and I will not.
Love, until my Friday appointment with Dr.C, concealed this glaring stupidity. I felt like the one who had betrayed his trust.
I know now, having doubled my years, that, in the words of Detective Doyle: "That's a secret, private world you're looking into out there." With only few exceptions, I respect other's privacy. But perhaps I respect it most because I've felt the bite of its violence.
