Secret Worlds

by Evie Hauksdottir-Neill

Our own interpretations shape the realities we inhabit, but they are often secrets to everyone but ourselves. The world is only dense because of these secrets. Complex thought brings substance to our worlds, though unfortunately, most are mostly conveyed inaccurately. When they are conveyed like this, without care, secrets lose their nuance. Their substance dissipates. This nuance is integral to the framework of every reality, it is the ebbs and flows which turn a mountain to a lake. The nuances build the difference between love and infatuation, between war and competition, between parody and imitation. Every person holds within themselves a secret reality, filled with trembling wisps of knowledge, but it is sometimes even hidden from the ones who experience it. This means that most of our world is secret. However, secrets are not locked away. To imply this is to accuse pretentiousness onto our own beings. Every world we could ever hope to matriculate is accessible through simple curiosity. But secret worlds are dynamic, and this is what gives them such a quixotic nature. Secrets smile impishly at non-knowers, and imply a frustrating slyness. We are simultaneously intimidated by and enamored by secrets, dying to know what the very things are that make this world so robust. 

Secrets are also quiet, though able to be sensed. They are the most still of moments, the most timid of facts. Secrets are also the loudest of things, so loud that they envelop us. Secrets are like the atmosphere, the particles that create us, and things we still have yet to discover... the slightly unknown. In ways, we know these things; we know them because they exist alongside us, making up the framework of every non-secret. We know what they cause, we know them because they are us, but we do not know what they are in essence, besides as a feeling of impending curiosity. We are but a dance on the trickster’s court.

Because secrets make it clear to us what a non-secret is, they are in and of themselves vessels of knowledge. They create that webbing of density in this world, opening us up to play and explore throughout a made-up series of metaphorical canyonlands. Secrets are never kept from us, they are self-given gifts, because only we decide what we do not know, and what type of knowledge to create.