Oh I Lie!
I lie sometimes, a trick I recently acquired and often utilised for my own benefit, to avoid some people, and to enable myself to cry in peace. I stopped sharing, I stopped caring. Oh the pleasant void of emptiness that hollows my heart in the humid July weather, coercing me to spit out my actualities into the dirty puddle formed on the road right outside my house. Behold, the sweet sweet aroma of narcissism that erupts from every last drop of my sweat. The self-inflated ego, the God-complex, the tendency to judge without knowing, to question without answering, and to cry without crying. I am what I am and I am not in the least proud of who I am.
A friend today shared with me her struggles with existing. I lied to her that she deserved to live. None of us deserve to. Lie. Hell, I would say we don’t even deserve to die. We all are puppets in this big stage of life either questioning our collective existence or ignoring it altogether and just going on and on like insects in the rain, meeting new people, earning new experiences and telling new lies to people we met just minutes ago.
Sometimes, I wish I could tell people how amiable life actually is if only we could shift our collective focus. But I’d be lying and this is a new skill I have acquired. I am just learning to learn it. I wish I could tell them as mortal beings we are only programmed to partake in a certain number of emotions and feelings we know and then there are some feelings hard to put into words. There are people impossible to please, there are truths harsher than a June afternoon sunlight. There are lies told to protect someone, there are lies told to harm someone. Who decides what?
I heard a story once. Of a husband and his wife. The wife was a good woman, the husband was not that good a man. The husband once asked his wife what was she planning to do if he dies. The wife replied that she’d mourn him and that she could never remarry. The man died in peace. The next day, after the wife’s tears dried up, she found a younger man hanging around her house and within two weeks, she married him and had two beautiful boys with him. The younger boy was named after her deceased husband, not the elder.
Lying is second nature to a man, else our survival would be tough, almost impossible. I lie not because I love it, on the contrary, because I absolutely despise it. Sometimes I wonder if I am even a man. Or am I just a coward who has seen the ugliest facet of humanity and yet struggles to not be alone? I use too many commas in my writing, not because I like it, but because my brain pauses after every few words and I can’t lie and write with good punctuation.
Oh once again, the dreadful happenstance took place today when my friend told me how she wanted to die.
Time just deepens the scar, the scab formed keeps unfolding and exposing the wound to irritants time and again. Time is a farce anyway. They are about to put it in practical theory that present, past and future are happening at the same time and it's just our audacity to perceive it in a linear way holding us back from experiencing it in its true form. Anyway, time is a relative force. It happens to be the antidote to loneliness. Whomever you are with. They leave. Even the rats leave a sinking ship. And we are forever but sinking ships, trying to not drown ourselves.
I try not to lie about my narcissism and my tendency to hurt with my words. My ugliness of nature, my roughness of texture and my grey area of morality. I exist to lie, to hurt, to betray, perhaps. Or perhaps, everyone does it and I am just late to the party. I am a narcissist and I don’t deserve to live? Why am I not dying then?
Because I am too sad to die. But I wish I wasn’t that sad and I could embrace what lies ahead of me, the ever-enchanting embrace of mother death! The sweet nectar of freedom from this crass existence where we form attachments, develop feelings beyond our control and in a huge evolutionary misstep we became too self-aware, thinking it separates us from the cluster that is the rest of the ecosystem. It doesn't. Self-awareness is a painful venom that is injected within us through a combination of upbringing, education, work, money, labour, love, friendship, and usual ‘human crap’ like this and we are supposed to bear the burden of it through our lifetimes.
Ironically, I have learned that there is beauty in sadness and pleasure in despair. To let the pain travel through your veins and limbs and eyes, and mind, and heart, is a unique experience, without falling into the category of ‘good or bad’. And there are things we learn and things we unlearn. Things that could kill us and things that fail at that.
A realization soothes me that one day, everyone I have ever known will die. Nobody will be left. Who will I lie to then? Am I forever doomed to be the only honest man on the face of the earth? Scary thought. Isn’t it? But for a megalomaniac narcissist like me, it's nothing. Really!
