Secret

I was brushing my teeth this morning when I suddenly realized I am a counterfeit.

My mouth was full of foam. The person in the mirror didn’t look very presentable. But presentability wasn’t exactly my top concern at the moment.

I have a secret.

What it is doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s there, like an object, taking up space. I can feel its weight. Not weight in the literary sense — a very physical sensation, like wearing too many layers in winter. Everything feels off, but you can’t quite tell which layer you should take off.

I watch people a lot.

A colleague of mine, last week at lunch, told us he’d failed four classes in college and nearly didn’t graduate. He was laughing when he said it. Everyone else was laughing too. The air was still air. The chopsticks were still chopsticks. Nothing changed. I sat there chewing my scrambled eggs with tomato, thinking: some people just have it easier. Their secrets come out as jokes. Mine would come out as an incident.

That’s probably not fair. Everyone thinks their own secret is the heaviest one. Psychology probably has a name for this tendency — some bias, some effect. But knowing the name doesn’t help. It’s like learning you have “influenza” instead of “sore throat plus feeling like shit.” You don’t feel any less like shit.

Sometimes I imagine saying it out loud.

The scene usually goes like this: I’m sitting somewhere, one person or many people across from me, and I open my mouth. My voice is steady, like I’m reading from a script I’ve prepared. Then — then nothing. My imagination breaks off right there. It’s not that I can’t picture the consequences. Quite the opposite. I can picture them too clearly. Everyone’s eyes would gain an extra layer. I’d go from being “a normal person” to being “that person.” A permanent parenthetical trailing after my name.

You know the kind.

But there are moments — usually at three in the morning, or on some particularly ordinary afternoon, like right now — when I feel an almost irrepressible urge to just say it, out loud, to everyone. Not out of bravery. Out of exhaustion. Keeping a secret is physical labor. Constant, highly repetitive, no-overtime-pay physical labor. I’ve mentally submitted three hundred resignation letters. Not one has been approved.

On second thought, that urge lasts about seven seconds. Roughly the same duration as a sneeze.

Then it passes.

So I took the third path — doing nothing. Not choosing is itself a choice; that sentence belongs on the cover of a bestselling self-help book, paired with a blurry ocean sunset. But in practice it doesn’t feel like that. It’s standing in the middle of the road, both directions open, and you look down at your shoes and start wondering if it’s time to replace them. Not numbness. A remarkably precise attention to things that don’t matter.

Life goes on as usual.

Alarm. Get up. Brush teeth. Leave the house. On the subway a kid keeps kicking the back of my seat; his mother is on her phone. Get to the office, turn on the computer, answer emails. A colleague asks what I’m doing this weekend. I say I haven’t decided. Lunch is a braised chicken rice bowl; the rice is a bit hard. An unnecessary meeting in the afternoon. Clock out. Go home. Sit on the couch.

The bomb is still there.

It hasn’t gone off. It hasn’t gotten smaller. It’s just there.

A package arrives. A pair of slippers I ordered three days ago. Gray. I open the box, try them on. They fit.

I think, well. At least one thing went right today.