MIKEY

I thought the high wire was writing every hidden thing finally on a page.

Scary as hell, but I did it anyway.

I was wrong.

The page was a net.

Sentences let me say the worst things in a calm voice because nobody's watching me say them.

I hate my mother's face reads like an addition to a grocery list that I could type and walk away from until I read it out loud.

And something happens I don't expect.

My voice goes thin, my breath shallow, and my throat tightens.

I sit with my own words in front of me, words I write and mean but can't say.

I apologize to the air and then start again and again, thinking I'm getting through the hard part, only to listen and be assaulted by my inner critic.

Writing lets me be honest and invisible at once.

Speaking drops the mask.

It exposes that I'm less afraid of the truth than of being heard saying it in a voice that might reveal something untyped, weakness, or worse, that I don't mean any of it.

All my control parading his prose on a page gets caught naked in recordings.

The page doesn't argue back, yet my inner prosecutor, the one that's been checking my motives since I was six, heads straight for my throat and breath.

Who'd want to hear you talk about yourself again? You already wrote a fucking book.

Say it once and shut up.

This isn't courage.

It's vanity.

Now you're narrating your suffering on a podcast? Are you kidding? That's not honesty.

It's narcissism.

I used to think this voice was protecting me from saber-toothed tigers.

Lately, I think it's just protecting silence.

It doesn't care who gets hurt.

It assaults anything that moves.