Yeah, right.
The truth will rip large, irreparable holes in your stockings, explode buttons, rend sleeves from their seams, leave only dangling threads and wonder. The truth will choke you like cracked pepper down the wrong pipe, tears streaming down your cheeks long after you realize you aren’t going to die, have only become re-acquainted with the knowledge of your own death. The truth will obliterate your fantasies, hopes, well-polished denial system. The truth will topple your perfectly-constructed life, the lie so old and barely visible that you forgot it’s still there. The truth will scorch the soil under your feet, making it barren for the rest of all known time. The truth will make you a stranger in your own mirror, highlight your sags, crow’s feet, bulges, puffiness under the eyes, gray at your roots. The truth will make everyone you thought you knew into a stranger.
Like Laertes’ sword, manhood came dipped in poison. One lover’s truths exploded out of him, covering me in shrapnel. Another’s truth sucked all the air out of the space between us, locking up every possible molecule of oxygen, leaving me gasping like a fish tossed too far up the river bed. One’s truth leaked undetected like arsenic in a wine glass; I didn’t die, but it put me off wine for a bit.
“Tell me the truth,” yet another lover coaxed. Safety was mine for the asking, the lie and the cover-up, the bow of my head to evade his direct gaze – all of these were within reach. Were mine if only I’d chosen them. “Lie!” my inner voice yelled, with the adrenaline rush of full autonomic nervous system activation. “I don’t think he means it,” whispered my inner trickster, masquerading as a voice of calm inner protector. “You’re not being fair,” beckoned some remnant of a pro-peace Buddhist philosophical stance, one I try on every so often when I tell myself to breathe. “Of course he means it, he really wants to know. You have to try again.”
The ability to forgive someone who has acted horribly stays just as long as a quick glimpse in the fitting room mirror. “Breathing in, I’m aware I’m breathing in. Breathing out …” I look awful! I’m enraged at the unflattering khaki Capris responsible for the preposterous image the mirror returns. I squirm and wriggle out as fast as possible. I stuff forgiveness and truth and compassion and the stupid fucking directive to breathe into the shapeless colorless pants, leave it all in a giant heap on the floor, storm out.
Sometimes I take chances with a lover, tell a bit of my truth, believing that this time, this person, this truth – surely all the factors are right this time, I’ll get it right this time, this time the truth will set us both free . . .
It doesn’t. I’m left with truth’s devastating aftermath.
And with stupid, fucking breathing.