I have lied before, I remember gritting
my teeth when I first told one. Youth
introduces us to it because we fear
the scrutiny of our parents, our givers
of care. We first lie out of fear of
disappointment or simply fear.
Soon we understand lying to them is
useless, we may lack an understanding of
who we are but they don’t; it’s their job
to understand us. Knowing we can’t
lie to them, we look towards people
we know well: friends or cousins or sibling.
They happen to be understanding it
so they plan to experiment. We lie
about who we kiss, who we fight,
and who we like when the swings on the
playground fail to produce joy and laughter and
merriment.We grow taller and expand our vocabulary,
a depot for our weapons, so we may lie
to others: teachers, figures of authority,
strangers, and ourselves. Teachers are just
parrots who get paid, if they’re bad,
if they’re good, they turn out to be an
extension of our parents or maybe a
substitute for them. Figures of authority
gage us on personal experience. Strangers
rarely care. When it comes to us, you or
me, we love to lie to ourselves. The mirror
holds a thousand secrets, but it houses
ten-thousand lies. Our appearance, our
stability, our existence becomes victim
to our repression of truth. Confidence
grows in our ability to lie and so we hit
those we love the most with it, our
boyfriends and girlfriends and anyone
else we love. The purity of love can be
demolished with the horror of lies.
She sees someone else, he sees someone
else, and they come home and kiss us
on the lips and say the movie was
great but it would’ve been better
if we was only there with them to fill the
void. After love, comes lying to the boss:
“It’ll be done by Monday and yes, I was sick.”
Lying to the neighbors: “I’d love to come over
but I’ve got some papers from work to fill out.”
Lying to the priest, priestess, or nothing:
I swear on these beads in my hand”,
“I swear on the blood of the first kill”,
“I swear to nothing”. Then, when we
least expect it, the sun rises, as it has
at thousand or more times before, and
we think to ourselves where life has gotten
us, where the lying has taken us.
But just as we wake up to our mirror,
the one that lies to us about how
we look, and to our love, who has lied
about where they’ve been, to see our
own kids look up to us with words in
their mouth hiding behind gritted teeth.
