It’s hardest when I receive a confession from a friend who didn’t mean to tell me. When strangers confess their lives to me, it rolls right off my back, but when it’s a close friend, it is much harder. I haven’t gone back through my journals to track who the first confessor was, but Calvin was pretty close to the first. For all I know, adults were confessing their lives to me and I didn’t recognize it for what it was. I have received many difficult confessions, but the worst was a horrible, four-day confession from another close friend of mine that is still unspoken between us to this day.

I am still friends with this person. I want to tell the confession, but it has remained unspoken between us for so long that talking about it even as much as I am right now might shatter the entire facade. He confessed so much that I know things about him that only a lover would know, yet I’ve never been intimate with him in any way. His wife suspects that I have and it hurts like a wound every time I think about it.

I know that I receive these confessions for a reason. Even the strangers who confess what amounts to insignificant things to them, tell me stories that become embedded in my body like broken glass. Sometimes I can remove the shards, but others are difficult to pick out. Eventually my skin grows over the glass, but they are always with me and sometimes I bleed.

I have been bleeding for over sixteen years and I don’t know how to remove his confession from my skin. I received a particularly disturbing confession from an acquaintance almost a year ago that was so similar to my friend’s confession that the wound opened fully. I thought that treating the acquaintance’s confession in the manner that I felt like I should have treated my friend’s confession would heal the old wound, but I’m still bleeding.