I have a couple friends with whom, regardless of time apart, I can fall into conversation with as if we did it every day. One is the boy I kinda sorta dated during high school and after who ended up being the best man in my wedding and the other is a friend I met though work twenty-some years ago (and to even be able to write a sentence with that kind of time span in it freaks me out). Last night, she was in town on business. It happens somewhat infrequently, but we ended up having a lot of one-on-one time. I suppose I should come up with a name for her, but I can’t think of anything at the moment so she’s just “her.”
So anyway, we spent a lot of time taking about our personal lives and how they’ve evolved over the years. Both of us happened to fall in love with married people at about the same time, though the outcomes were very different, so there was much catching up and comparing of experiences. Also, after I first moved to this city, I wrote a lot. I did this because I was an angst-filled youth in a new town with no friends and not even a TV. There was time, so I wrote. Not unlike how I write now, but that was all fiction while none of this is. I used to send it to her to read back then. This was, of course, before the internet. We’re talking wood pulp marked with petroleum-based ink being manhandled by government workers.
In any event, she asked me a couple times if I still wrote and I gave sort of mumbling noncommittal answers. She even suggested I was writing in secret which was either very perceptive or a lucky guess, but she eventually pressed me by saying, “You don’t even have a blog or anything?”
“Oh, I have a blog.” What? How are you going to explain this, bunny boy?
I guess I thought I’d just say it was secret and leave it at that, but over the years we had shared very personal details about ourselves and she was having none of it. She wanted to know what it was about and why was it a secret. I told her it was started immediately after Belle and I had issues in our marriage and it detailed our relationship. She pressed some more. I said it also described my evolving sexuality. She said she knew I was queer and I said there’s a lot more to sexuality than gender preferences. Finally, I told her reading the blog was not unlike cracking open my head and peering into the most intimate and private part of my brain. And that there were explicit pictures. Of me.
She was perturbed. She felt I was keeping it a secret, even then, because I didn’t have faith in her and didn’t think she could handle what she saw there. I tried to explain that it was not that at all. That not everyone wants to know the kinds of things I say here about the people they associate with. I have many friends whose sex life I’m not even remotely interested in and frankly don’t want to hear about. My reticence in divulging the blog and its contents were out of respect for her right not to know everything about me. But she wasn’t buying it. Then I got nervous.
It’s not that this blog is embarrassing to me. It’s not. Really. This is who I am and I have no issues with it, but there are only two people I know of who know me personally who also know about this blog (and I’m married to one of them). Widening that circle is sort of a big deal. Also, it’s not just about me. Belle’s in here, too. At this point, I maintain my secret identity mostly out of respect for her.
In the end, I spilled my guts. Everything. We discussed my perversions, we discussed the relationship dynamic, we talked hardware, she knows I haven’t come in a month. The sky did not fall. There were many questions and I was forthcoming with answers to them all. We have very different life perspectives, but we respect one another and (I assume) her opinion of me is safe (but there are almost 700 posts here for her to read, so we’ll see how that goes).
So now there are three people who know (you know, not counting the teeming horde of you guys who come and read my drivel).



