Deep Dark Places

Trey Smith

You don't know me. You don't really know Scott or Ta-Wan either. Though the three of us write very candidly about various aspects of lives, none of you out there truly knows who we are.

By the same token, though many of you have left numerous comments throughout the years, we don't know you. All we think we know are the brief glimpses that you share. Beyond that, it is anybody's guess.

But you'd be mistaken if you thought this is a post about the anonymity inherent with the internet. Regardless of the venue or situation, we each remain a mystery to others (and ourselves) a good deal of the time.

Della and I have been together as a couple for 29 years. Sometimes we get to thinking that the other could not possibly share an experience, thought or idea that seems to come out of the blue and yet it happens all the time. Just a week or so ago, I learned that Della's seizures as a child occurred only when she was asleep or sick. In all of our various conversations on this subject over the years, I'm fairly certain that she never shared this fact.

My maternal grandparents were married for over 60 years -- that's a damn long time! I bet they learned new things about each other even after all those years. It is hard not to; we each possess deep dark places that rarely see the light of day. It is not only that other people rarely glimpse them, but we rarely venture there ourselves.

The impetus for this post comes from former Kansas City Chiefs General Manager Scott Pioli. He is one of the people who witnessed Jovan Belcher commit suicide after Belcher had murdered his girlfriend in cold blood.

"The truth is I haven't made sense of it," Pioli said on The Dan Patrick Show, his first public comments about the incident. "I don't know if any one of us that were there will ever make sense of it. Here's the reality: Every human being, I don't care who you are, have these deep dark places and you don't know, even those you're most intimate with, there's something you don't know. Clearly there was something with Jovan that none of us knew."

Regardless of the level of intimacy with a fellow human, we never truly know anyone completely. There always are aspects of another that we will never know. Heck, few of us will ever truly know ourselves, so how can we expect really to know someone else?