don't be my friend (i am a traitor)

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Don’t be my friend. Don’t tell me what you might fear, what you really think about your sister, how you got those bruises. Don’t tell me anything. Don’t even come by my house and laugh with your mouth open. I will count your fillings and know what you find funny. People who have very little to say for themselves are careless with the lives of others. I am a spiller of secrets - they plash easily out the sides of my mouth.

Writers have no ethics, if by ethics you mean respect for the lives and truths of others, if by respect you mean leaving them alone, and if by leaving them alone you mean not ever seeing them as material. Words are a currency and the lives of others an entire economy. How much to tell? How shall it be told? What you know of someone else’s life has one value when kept to yourself and a different value when told. One power when you shut the door behind you, lean in close to my ear, when we go to the movies together, laugh behind cinderblock buildings, send notes to each other from our own pens in our own hands. When I watch your face change like clouds moving over water. We feel so close, these intersections of our lives like a secret conduit. We actually believe we might feel the same way about something.

And then there is the power of turning your sigh into a metaphor, our car trip into a narrative with a significant ending. The power of turning you out of the inner folds of my life and into dialogue.

That time we were kids and your father yelled at you in front of me and you didn’t guard your face, which crumpled, as we would never want our faces to crumple, into the folds of an old man who knows for sure it won’t get any better. I saw that. It was mine. And you knew I saw it, so it was ours. And now it’s not.

We all want to be loved, but some of us are willing to gut our lives of secrets, their moist insides stiffening and cracking in the sun, then look, like a dog, for approval. Some of us are willing to never live a moment again until we’ve inked it on the page. Some of us don’t know how else to live. I don’t know how else to live.

 (So don’t be my friend.)

"

Amy Benson, "Ethics of Nonfiction"

(via e.tao)