I am starting to worry that no one is a liar.
It has made my life so simple to write those who've wronged me off as liars, blackened with bile and laden with malicious falsehoods. It's easier that way. My self-esteem is reinforced by the notion that it takes unabashed hatred of humanity to retract one's love so capriciously. Oh, delicate peony that is my innocent heart, save yourself the trouble of blooming this season... it's poisoned with people who disdain the truth. The facts, the legitimate, the actual, the reality - that's what you need to flourish. Not this cold climate of cynicism and selfishness. Not in a world where, when given the choice between black and white, all select ebony automatically, unthinkingly.
However, and much to my chagrin, there has been a whisper of doubt in this philosophy from the bowels of my mind as of late. I am sure that many of you readers out there (all none of you, probably) are wondering what has taken me so long to awaken from this ridiculous daydream. There has never been a world within which truth is absolute. There is no black and no white, and no gray either. Everything is technicolor and kaleidoscopic, mercurial and merciless, transient and true for the moment. There are no facts when it comes to matters of one's heart, of one's love, unless one could rule constant conditionality as a fact. And in this world where no one is wrong, how am I ever going to know when I am right? As the patron saint of this blog recently stated, "Love is the king of the beasts, and when it gets hungry, it must kill to eat." But really, is martyring oneself to said lion NOT the point of being alive? What's worth preserving? What's worth protecting? When you lie alongside someone and know you "are not cut from the same tree, but are like two pieces of the gallows that share a common dream", is that alright? Do those pieces even fit together, and really, does your ultimate goal as a collective apparatus signify righteousness or maliciousness? FUCK! Is anyone allowed to know anything?
A wise man told me the other night, as we gazed over the muffled and studded hills of Los Angeles, that no one is ever out of the woods. It calmed me at the time as it justified my constant state of panic, but I find myself lamenting, along with Bill, "If [I] could only stop [my] heartbeat for just one heartbeat...." Image the calm that would come with hiatus from constant pursuit! Oh, the bird-like freedom of nothing to chase and nothing from which to hide! The seduction of self-inflicted loneliness, with its flowery pheromones distinctly feminine and self-righteous, mocks my risky behavior with its seeming stability. A salve to soothe the sting of stupidity's scrapes, the raspberry badges of effort in an ultimately failed attempt at being adored.
But said salve does its own damage, in scar form. A tissue so thick that one doesn't bother trying to caress through it anymore. At least, this is what I am sure would happen were I to ever let this tissue form. I am CERTAIN, absolutely and factually, that once I stop bleeding I won't feel anymore! Once all of these liars harden me, there is no turning back, no opening anymore, no more of this pretend love that I dole out by the handful, like chum dumped into the ocean and summoning whichever fish is hungry enough. I will isolate myself in a cage made of truth: a reality of disbelief in anything. Everyone is always fake, no one ever meant anything that they said, and here I sit without ever needing to worry about it again. Yes, indeed, all figured out.
And here I find myself on the white end of the extreme, and being confronted again by the fact that there is no white. Therein lies the worry. Maybe no one is a liar. Maybe I've been duped by my own gauge, drunk on what I thought to be confidence in my ability to read people. Maybe no one is no good, or maybe I am no good and didn't deserve that truth in the first place. I've tied my mind in a knot trying to discern what's worth trusting, and for what? To be correct at the end? To win, while really just losing? I've taken to making lists of the components of the tangle, in allegorical form, of course, so that it might free up a little room in my brain. These lists have been titled "Things that might fix things" and the like. The following is an example:
1. Laundry
2. Groceries
3. Sing
4. Write letters
5. Bathe
6. Eat
7. Clean
I figure that love is so well-documented and hailed throughout the history of humanity, the best way to invite it is to live as humans always have. Complete the tasks that people have completed and you will complete forever in some incarnation. Live as a human in their basest form (not primal, necessarily, but base) would live and see what comes of the simplicity. These things fix things, or at least sustain survival under the crushing weight of broken things. It's a fact, after all, that these things have to get done if you're alone or not. Do they work? Yes.... in the sense that I've not jumped off of either side of the bridge. Do they erase pain? No, though they do make all of the injustices feel like one large river, rather than individual estuaries being pumped from specific sources. Rather than smarting from the specific moments of misunderstanding and hurt, one's heart feels a somber, broad bruise that hasn't a name or a face but a scent and a song. It's always the same song.
These men, these boys that I have for so long resented as enemies of the truth, have allowed me access to this river of sorrow, this universal and ambiguous flowing body of pain that is present in the life of every human being. My heart swims in the one unifying constant of human existence thanks to these people whom I thought had withheld honesty from me. I now know human truth because of liars, and truth is not being alone in my own cage. It is treading water in a tumultuous body full of my peers, my lovers, my enemies, my friends. We're all swimming in this pain now, we've all been done wrong, be it by a lover, a killer, a politician, a rapist, a parent, a friend or a simple misunderstanding of one's own self. It's that unifying factor, that human constant, that gives birth to love. So thanks be to all the liars out there who told me what they thought was the truth. Here, buried in this water, "I will geyser." And buried in this fire, "I'm gonna phoenix."
