When I was eight years old, keeping a diary was at the occupation du jour of many a convent-going girl harbouring not-so-secret dreams of best-selling authorship - an irony if you took into account that a diary, a refuge for one’s secrets, was being shamelessly flaunted like a status symbol (I have a hardcover book! And I write with rainbow pens! I bet you don’t have one! Or either!), an intimate, personal artifact is being homogenised into so many little squares made of ticky tacky - not leather, ‘cause it’s too… old - that looked the same and housed even more similar secrets.
Without divulging their contents except when necessary (I wrote about our fight and how I hated you so much I could not friend you ever again you stupid dumb useless stupid stupid dumb dumb!), just like a Disney summer blockbuster trailer that tells you nothing and everything or the coquettish lasses they read about aloud in English Lit 101 that their mummies fervently groom them to be, these manuscripts were pimped with all manner of stickers and blinkies and doodads bought from the same stationery store in school as each girl tried to make hers more singular, more special, more “personal expression”.
My sister was one of these secret-keeping exhibitionists who, like many other coy little convent girls who seamlessly teased and threatened by turns, made sure I knew she had a diary and was regularly filling it up with wonderful things that had nothing to do with me and horrible things that had everything to do with me, when I was not the catalyst of her problems.
If her life were neatly diagrammed into the circles of a Venn chart, my neighbourhood would have been squarely among the blue-blacks and brown-greens she hated and would no doubt have used to colour her circle of awful things.
She hated me because eight-year olds are stupid and bratty that way, and I was a most prime specimen in that respect, she would repeat with so much consistency, discipline and energy that I thought it deserved applause when I wasn’t cursing her out (stupid stupid dumb dumb idiot moron nincompoop fool impostor devil’s daughter hate hate hate die die DIE).
Anyway, diary-keeping was so popular that even our Aunty H, most certainly far beyond convent-going age, had heard of it and it became fodder for our conversations over lunch (which I found incongruous because why talk about something so purportedly private?)
While sis prattled on about the who, what, why, when and how (I like to write on hardcover notebooks because they look so special and serious, with my Pilot G-7 gel pen - have you heard of it? - because the ink is so nice!) of the craft, I paid full attention because:
Aunty H listened with a patience only found among people her age, and smiled at the end. She turned to me and asked: “Do you want to keep a diary too?”
Boy, did I ever! But I held myself back, partly out of shyness and partly because I was excited, doggammit!
She did not quite wait for my response, in her infinite wisdom that again was only found among her ilk of oldies, and very simply declared: “I have never kept a diary.”
Whoa, seriously? Isn’t that supposed to be sophisticated grown-up business? (And I still remembered confusing sophisticated with elegance as a child. More proof that I should not be a writer, hah!) We were surprised, my sis more vociferous in her display than I was.
Aunty H, ever smiling, said: “The safest place to keep a secret is in your heart. Diaries can be stolen, your secrets exposed. I keep mine safe inside.”
Such genius! Such elegance! Such simplicity! I wanted to pipe in plus it’s cheaper too! but did not want to mess up the zen-like composure of her message.
So I took her advice to heart, perhaps too strictly and literally, for I kept all my secrets concealed as best as I could, so compressed within that the mass of thoughts, emotions, memories and knowledge collapsed into itself like a black hole, sucking in innocent ideas and expressions in its ever-growing ambit.
Which leads us to today, my inability to express myself. The black hole is obvious in my silence, my refusal to look straight at you, and my nonchalance. I really can’t give a shit, too bad, so sad.
Words unspoken will die messily, like suicide bombers they take many more with them, unfortunate casualties in this web that tangles over time.
Ideas uncommunicated, unexecuted. Thoughts unshared. Opinions unargued. Insults unlaunched. Jokes unused. That cancer of silence metastasised, killing them all. And it’s all my fault.
The sound of silence rings hollow.
