Everyone is entitled to their privacy, right? Everyone is burdened by their past and worthy of a future free of that crushing weight. Correct?
Ghouls of all types prefer to keep our pasts close to the vest. We shy away from the glass houses of metaphor and the illumination of reality. We hide our secrets away—under canvas in attics and in our ambitions for ourselves. We bury them deep within ourselves, so tightly compacted that their fusion powers an evil that attracts all who fall within its gravitational field.
The trouble with secrets is that they are rarely secret. Sure, the details are present only in a liminal state, never graspable and lucent only in their aftereffects. But one wears the results of secrets on every fiber of their being, from the lines around our world-weary eyes to our several times resoled shoes.
The trouble with secrets is that there are two kinds: those we keep from others, and those we keep from ourselves. Nothing haunts us like the words we cannot say—even to ourselves.
