the trust was a creation which I had wrought, gradually, painfully, as a nest of glass, of gossamer. it made its nest in the cavity of my ribs. a small nervous bird.

then the storm. a quarrel, small in its genital, huge in its devastation. it had started with a firebrand of fury, blazing and pure, but the atmosphere within me soon changed. the anger was a fire, clean and too bottled up, directed at everything including myself, and left the heavy cold ash of guilt. it was a compound, that fucking guilt, coarse and gritty. it was a part of everything, gnashing at the seams of my thoughts, eating away at the core.

and then she told her friends.

that’s what friends are for, isn’t it? to hold your confessions. to share the burden. a sacred chorus of complaint to validate your pain. i know the script, i have heard it all my life.

but i looked at my own hands, and they were empty. my tongue, a stone. because i would never tell. i would never expose a person like that, flay them open for the scrutiny of a casual audience. to me, it is a kind of violence.

i have been on that stage, you see. under those lights. at the slightest fuck-up, the merest misstep, the curtain would rise. and a whole company of acquaintances, their faces once familiar, would become a jury. the whispers there was a current of it and drew me along. the collective, silent hate — or what seemed to be it, an indignant pity — was a pressure that made me desire to undo it. to just dissolve into the air. it is a particular kind of terror. to be so thoroughly seen and so completely despised.

that's why i bite.

my silence is not nobility, not a higher virtue. a plain baring of teeth. a preemptive strike against a pain i know too well. i hold the hurt close, let it fester in the dark of me, because that is a cleaner wound, a private bruise. it is better to be the one who is bitten in the quiet of your own soul than to be the one thrown to the pack.

so i bite my tongue. i bite back the words. i only make it sure that the scar is mine, and mine alone. just so it doesn't hurt.