Well now, let’s be honest, you never meant to show me that ragged old attic of your soul—those crooked beams and dusty rafters best left alone, I suppose, with the spiders’ webs and the stale old secrets hung up like Sunday hats. Yet show me you did, as if throwing open a door one gray morning and announcing, with fine ceremony, that we should both take a good, hard look at the mess inside. I must say, I found that rather impolite, though I doubt politeness was the order of the day.
All this rummaging through the shabby corners of your being made me realize something simple and rather inconvenient: I don’t know you, not half so well as I once believed. I thought I’d been strolling through a tidy little parlor, set with fine china and embroidered pillows, instead of a tumbledown warehouse stocked haphazardly with rusted truths. I guess that’s how it often goes—folks don’t so much change before your eyes; it’s your eyes that begin to see them truly, and then, my friend, it’s curtains for all your pleasant illusions.
Now that the door is opened, I find myself quite determined to nail it shut again. There’s no need to keep poking about in that moldy gloom—no need to hoard resentments like some folks hoard old newspapers that no one will ever read again. Better to leave them to rot quietly in the darkness. I shall remember those brighter afternoons—when the sun was warm, and the laughter easy, and we imagined the world to be populated by honest hearts and graceful manners. Those recollections will do nicely, and the rest, well, they can drift back into the attic’s shadows, collecting dust, just as they ought to.
So go along, now—be someone I used to know. I’ll stay here behind this newly sealed door, content in my better illusions, richer in a strange way for having learned just enough to know I prefer not to learn any more.
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