If you tell someone...

Each Monday some of us at Write, Eat, Post, Bathe writing group are going to post one of these little lists.  Ten secrets.  Am I writing down ten secrets?  Huh.  Your government trusted me with secrets. I never told them and don't intend to. 

I have three secrets I never tell a soul.  I don't even say them out loud.  The nature of a secret is this: if you tell one person, it is no longer a secret.  And I can, as we have established, keep a secret.  So the best you can hope for is 10 little-known facts.  Here they are:

10. I love purses.  I have way more than you can imagine.  I also hate cleaning them out.  Too time-consuming.  So I have little bags of stuff that I can grab and put into the new purse.  Presto chango.

9.  You were hoping for some real dish.  Sorry.  I told you I am good at keeping secrets.  Let's see...  Number Nine.... I used to really hate the look of my big toes.  I don't now.  The toes still look the same as before, so I think something inside my head changed.

8.  I have Asperger's Syndrome.  Not a secret.  I just might not have told you.  I have it in a very mild form.  Don't let that make you think I don't have problems with it.  I am 51 and have great coping skills.  What you don't know is that I like having it despite the problems.  There are things, not the least of which is the ability to hold gigantic amounts of stuff in my head at the same time and manipulate all that to my benefit, that are downright cool.  The wanting to run away and hide in most public situations is not so much cool.  I work on that.

7.  I used to spend a lot of time up in trees when I was a kid.  I would take a bag of non-perishable food and books and stay and stay. 

6.  I like to look at small things, like the pattern that some bees and wasps make in the dirt or a drop of water on the tip of a leaf, stuff like that.  I like to hide in small places.  I wish I was very small sometimes so that I could secret myself into a nook and stay and stay.

5.  I was a virgin way longer than you would believe, so I won't bother telling you.  No, really.  I don't care what you heard.

4.  I actually say the things that people say they wish they had said or would have said to people who are abusing children in public.  I have called the law on one occasion too. 

3.  I count how many times I talk out loud during a class session so that I won't talk too much.  You will not, if you are in class with me, believe this since I still talk a lot.  You can ask my early college professors before I adopted this tactic. I wouldn't shut up.  See 8 above for an clue to this phenomenon.

2.  I am racked by guilt.

1.  I want to write a reasonably-well-received book of stories.

Now, I have 2 secrets that I have never told a soul.