People interest me. Their thoughts, their feelings, their motivations. What makes them, made them, them. 

It’s not what people say but what they don’t say; the words between the words. The expression on their faces that often contradicts what they speak. The tone and cadence of their speech. All say more than the words and raises questions that are never asked because there is no space, no ground upon which you can stand, with them.

I always want to ask those questions. The embarrassing ones; the ones that are none of my business. The ones that are none of anyone’s business. Because there are some parts of us – thoughts, experiences, emotions, reactions, beliefs both rational and irrational, that we keep only for ourselves, and sometimes not even that. We bury some of ourselves within ourselves and we exhume them for no one, not even ourselves. Nor for our most loved, or even our therapists. 

Sometimes I can sense there is more, that some of what I sense is dark and painful and even sometimes that it is light or confusing. Sometimes I can even see, or feel, the unsaid, the barely acknowledged, the buried. It is diaphanous, there are no hard edges to define and contain it; it is the ghostly ectoplasm of their of their inner self. 

I want to wander around their inner rooms, like a nosey neighbor, not to judge the decor but to be delighted by their whimsy or share their despair, to reassure that they are not the only ones who have draped the mirrors so as not to see. 

I would not offer any of myself in this way. Yet I want this of others. Perhaps in knowing someone else you can know yourself. But it is not mine to know – either of another or me. They are not secrets, these answers I want to ask, but rather truths. Truths that have no basis in facts but rather feelings. The why of a person, even, perhaps most especially, when a ‘why’ does not exist. 

Oh the facts are good too. But they only lead to the doors of the inner rooms where a person really is, where they really live, or lived. I want to brush past the facts, gently elbow them out of the way, to get to the rooms of why. 

I haven’t toured my own inner rooms, yet I want access to others. I am not so curious about me as I am about you. Perhaps I think that in knowing you I can know myself? Without having to open my own doors, contemplate my own inner decor, I can whip off that drape on my mirrors and Ta Da! see the real me. The why of me. 

Draped mirrors – now an image in my conscious mind I can’t quite shake. The word ‘draped’ – dancing in my mind. Rustling in the breeze of curiosity, and yes, trepidation. But the image stops with me, hand on the cloth, the curtain, covering my mirror, about to tug it off…there the image stops. 

I want to see you but I’m not so sure I want to see me.