Dishonesty is a creature very much at home in my mind. Residing with Dishonesty are Distrust, Deception, Truth, and a little girl who carries with her a book of nursery rhymes that are too twisted for the young age she appears to be. But come closer, don’t just look – open your eyes and see…
See the lingering hurts of the world around her? Not the hurts of others – rather, pain that she never sought, but arrows that she took just the same. They are not visible to the eye until she turns her back to you. One, two, I want you… Can you see the reflection flickering across her, like an old picture show? She is the screen to what you project. Like many films, the images are a collage of lies that come to be truth.
Three, four, forever more… We all want something. A home, a family, wealth or fame. I want most to prove to that little girl that there is someone out there who does not want her for their own narcissistic need. Someone who does not turn a blind eye to the arrows piercing her skin, who sees her as more than performance art.
I’m the bad grown-up, who keeps bringing Dishonesty and Deception around while cajoling my inner child with “But this time it will be different, I promise!” yet my heart knows better. The broken shards of promises past stab at the souls of my wandering feet. Souls I have collected along my way, though my spirit dissipates ever more slowly at the breaking of each dawn.
Seven, eight, test your fate…
We could barricade ourselves away from the world, she and I. We could live harmoniously in my mind, rewrite the book of rhymes and paste colored flowers inside, that would flutter with the turning of the pages, and our minds would be a kaleidoscope of a sheltering truth.
What is the truth of perception? What is a world that we cannot hold up a lie in our bleeding hands and compare to the honesty that washes the blood away?
“The truth about lies is that we don’t always know when we’re telling them…” It is a chant that I hear from the little girl, as she sits so small in a chair with feet swinging, never touching the floorboards that creak beneath her. The dust is untouched. No prints to disturb it, as if it had been many moons since she’d climbed there to open the book in her lap. .
At each dawn, sleep finds me, and it wipes away remnants of the day before, and sometimes remnants of days before that. I don’t choose what is to stay, and what is taken. I don’t have a magic wand with which to command “Take away he who lied, she who hurt you with her betrayal! Banish the memory of those who’ve abandoned you!”
Fate decides. What is left to linger is what I can work with, what can be scribbled in a childish scrawl on pages that are scattered for others to read.
“The magic chose the shape, not I! I am a bearer! I am a dwelling!
I am but a messenger!”
Nine, ten, it starts again…
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.