Two Keys (Excerpt)

From a longer work currently under submission.

There were always two versions of things: the one that could be said, and the one that had to be managed.

At thirteen, writing became the only space that felt lockable. I kept a diary with a small silver key. I wrote as if the page were a room I could enter alone. The lock was more symbolic than secure.

I had one key. My mother had two.

She used to joke about it in front of her friends, laughing that I had one key and she had two. They laughed with her. The lock was mostly decorative. Control did not depend on access. It depended on who was allowed to look.

When I found out she had read the diary, my hands shook. I remember the heat in my face before I remember the words. In one entry I called her a stupid bitch. She said I was disrespectful. I said she should not read what was not hers.

After that, I never wrote without imagining someone standing behind me—in the driveway, in the car, outside my bedroom door.

Watching.

The pages stopped being confessions.

They became performances.

I learned to write what could survive being read.