At Knox PostSecret: Female, Brunette.

Listen. You, yes you. I have been reading your secrets, the digital postcards you send, though of course they are not secrets anymore, not a one. It is necessary to reveal secrets for the same reason it is necessary to release the fireflies you catch in a jar: you must keep them alive. To watch your secrets ride wind away from your breath, to see them drop and burrow into the ground, azaleas sprouting from the same spot a year later, or to see them pulled up into the sky, like snowflakes too light to land, is to see yourself, an image clearer than any mirror, the sharpest photograph. I’ll send you my secrets and you will hang them up, line your walls with them, until magazine cut words hurriedly collaged into the shape of my voice fall to the floor in piles, the story of the room obscured by mine. Let’s leave the lights on tonight. Let’s make a list of everyone we’ve ever loved and why, the number of kisses we’ve stolen, because what is a kiss if not a secret told to another set of lips? Let’s peel the wallpaper from the place you sleep in your parents’ house until we get to the very first layer, let’s trace our fingers along the seashell print and learn the story of the room, the dreams of the person who lived here first, the longing she had for the ocean. Tell me the story of that room in your ribcage, sing me that song stuck in your throat. Let me read the sestina that lies between your shoulder blades. Tell me who you are. Tell me who. Tell me. Let’s sit. Let’s set up a canvas and paint a world where everyone wears their secrets on their sleeves, where the worst and best things they have ever done can be read easily on their palms. And in this world, in the darkest nights, we will curl close to each other and whisper to one another, not secrets, for we know all of those here, from the night I spent shivering alone in the woods down to the last words you told the man you believed to be your father. Instead, we tell each other the only things we don’t know about one another: lies. And with every untruth, every falsehood, every discrepancy, we learn what our most telling secrets could never show us. We scratch out the names on our student IDs. We take the money. We run.