Secrets are dangerous.

They eat away at you, slowly, from the inside, like a slow-acting poison.

The shame takes residence in the pit of your stomach, where it causes a nausea that never seems to subside.

The guilt takes residence in your chest, where it weighs you down so immensely that you can feel your heart hurting from the pressure, you can feel yourself slowly suffocating.

The memories take residence in your mind, where they replay over and over, reminding you of things you can never take back, things you can never change.

These secrets can never come to the surface, so you push them further and further down, hoping that one day, they will just go away.

But they never go away. You push them and you push them as far as they will go. They jounce back, beating you up, ripping you apart from the inside out.

No one can see the damage. No one can see the poison flowing through you. You look okay on the outside. No one suspects a thing.

So you learn to live with your secrets. You let them overtake you, control you, because the alternative seems so much worse.

You can never tell anyone. You can never even write it out because then the paper will know. No one, no thing, can ever know. No one will ever understand the darkness that lives inside of you.

You become a slave to your secrets until the day there’s nothing left of you. Your mind is shattered. Your heart is broken. Your soul is gone forever.

And now you’re just a shell. One final tap and you’ll finally crack, you’ll finally fall to pieces.

But your secrets fall with you, too. No one ever has to know the truth. No one ever has to see the darkness.

Your secrets die with you.