Complex Numbers

Catching Zs

Another tough one today from "JAFBG"  [XGC]

Tell us about something that has been difficult for you to discuss in the past, but that you're ready to talk about now.

It's not tough because of the subject matter, but because the few things that are difficult for me to talk about are still difficult to talk about. And while I've mentioned some of these things to close friends, none of them are ready for this very public forum (I have the blog set to "Allow Everyone" in the so-far-thwarted hope that offsite people will read it and want to join WDC).

I think most people, confronted by this failure of ability to directly address the prompt, would just skip it. Not me, though. Because while it's difficult to talk about certain traumatic experiences in my early life, as any regular readers can attest, I don't have a problem spewing words on damn near any other topic, whether I'm qualified to or not.

For the sake of discussions, I'm going to use language as a compression algorithm, and rename that-which-we're-not-ready-to-talk-about to the letter Z. And I don't give a shit whether you pronounce that Zee or Zed.

Since I don't want to address Z directly, I'll come at it from an oblique angle.

In a meta sort of way, this is a direct response to the prompt, because I don't think I've even acknowledged the existence of Z in here. I just kind of assumed that people would know that I had stuff I was going to keep Z-cret (yea, I couldn't help myself, but to get that pun you have to pronounce that letter as it is in the US). Because, well, doesn't everybody? Maybe you tortured animals as a kid, but didn't grow up to be a serial killer, though if you admitted to it, people would assume that you were. Maybe you're sexually attracted to ten-year-olds but never do anything about it. Maybe you stole your brother's teddy bear and tore out the stuffing because he annoyed you, then blamed it on the dog, who ended up "on a farm." Maybe you know that your parents abused you, and you're not repressing the memory, but keeping it to yourself because they weren't all bad and you don't want people to think less of them. Whatever. Everyone has a Zkeleton.

Okay, that one was a bit forced, I admit it.

Or maybe it's a secret so dark, so terrible, that you can't even tell your closest friends about it. Or your religious leader, or your therapist. Instead, you bottle it up inside, erecting a wall between it and your everyday life, and most of the time you manage to forget about it. But sometimes, usually at three in the morning when you can't sleep because you drank too much the day before and the alcohol-induced coma has worn off, leaving a hung-over wakefulness, and you hear a scratching on that wall, and you remember. But you don't dwell on it too much, because right now, that wall is one of those Japanese rice paper partitions and if you acknowledged the full and horrible truth, it would come tearing through, panting and slavering.

Sure would be nice to have some cinderblocks right now, wouldn't it? And some mortar. Or at least something stronger than booze.

It's good to know that everyone has a Z, though. At least, I assume everyone does. Wow, what if someone doesn't have a Z? I just now realiZed that this is a possibility. How well-adjusted would they be? It's hard to imagine. But I call myself a writer, so I have to try:

All the contortions, all the action movie laser-grid acrobatics you have to go through to keep anyone from finding about Z, well, you don't have to do those, do you? You don't have to spend most of your waking hours desperately trying to forget it, and the rest carefully ensuring that no one finds out about it.

On the other hand... in that imaginary, utopian situation... where's your mystery? You have nothing to hold back, so those few people who give enough of a shit about you to get to know you, well, eventually, they just... know you. And then you're boring.

So yeah, maybe I'll hold on to all of my Zs for the foreZeeable future. I just hope I die before I get AlZheimer's and end up Zpilling the beans anyway -- the one bright spot being that no one would believe me if I'm Zpewing Ztuff if I've got dementia. I'm something of a fiction writer, after all, and maybe it was all part of some plot or another that never got written.

Or maybe it did, and I've passed off unbearable fact as fiction.

You'll never know.