"A neurosis is a secret that you don’t know that you are keeping.”

- Kenneth Tynan

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Roy March keeps his secrets in a box. His secrets don’t like this much, they jump and scream and try to escape the box every time he opens it; on the rare occasions that he does.

The box is small; too small for his secrets. When he’d first put his secrets in the box he had been much younger and he’d had fewer secrets; they’d all fit just fine then. But Roy has lots of secrets now and they’re lucky if the can brag the right to breathing room, let alone elbow room.

Roy used to have room for his secrets, he could look and examine all of them without trouble, he could think about them without confusing the details. But now he cannot; he cannot look at one secret without seeing another, cannot think of them clearly. So, often he doesn’t think of them at all.

And so now there are secrets in the box that he never put there.

This makes keeping his secrets easier for Roy, but it is hard for his secrets. It is in a secrets nature, after all, to be told; to escape the box, the bag, to end, to stop being secrets, but locked in a box one being confused with the next and the next and all the rest they will always be secrets. Nothing more.

All the same the secrets will never leave the box; Roy will be buried with them, in fact. Some, if they are lucky, will be able to escape the box through fault of rusty lock and rejoin the world then, though no longer as secrets. If they are lucky the will end with Roy. The rest will live on in a box in a coffin for eternity, with no elbow room to speak of and no one to share themselves with.

This is the fate of Roys’ secrets, but for now they remain in a locked box on top of Roys dresser.