How do you write around secrets, without revealing them?

I don’t write here because I write all the time. A memoir. A great big galloping thing with a word count that swells by the hour, that haunts my days and my thoughts like the most feverish of loves.

In front of me there’s orchids in pots, fat turtledoves and bluetits picking at sunflowers. Lush nettle high as my waist.
But truly I’m swimming in dead goats and thyme honey, olive trees and land turtles hidden in thorny burnet.

It looks like a bomb exploded in the living room.

Strewn in its wake are the archeological wonders that usually sleep undisturbed in the tombs of forgotten cupboards. A layer of silt gets occasionally added as the years go by, but the entrails lie left in peace. Dinosaurs bones under the latest phone bills.

Mary’s dug it all out and sits in a daze surrounded by the flotsam of memories, papers, memorabilia.
Some go back 110 years.

I find it written evocatively in a fiction book that’s about astronauts staying in space for months at a time :

“In his email her brother said in half jest that he hates being ill alone and that it must be nice to be with five others all the time, your floating family, he called it. Up here, nice feels like such an alien word. It’s brutal, inhuman, overwhelming, lonely, extraordinary and magnificent. There isn’t one single thing that is nice.

(…) She finds she often struggles for things to tell people at home, because the small things are too mundane and the rest ups too astounding and there seems to be nothing in between (…)”

(Orbital, Samantha Harvey)