How do you tell the difference between a tempting lie and a difficult truth?
Is it a lie because, tempting though it might be, it’s easier to turn away from? Is it true because that allows you to overlook how hard it is to deal with, forces you to accept the problems it creates?
Is it love that makes you struggle through a fight, or is it the need for security, for a familiar face and comfort?
Do we want the things we think we do? Do we want the thing, or the appearance of it? The idea, the memory, the connection to some half-remembered dream lost somewhere in our past?
Once upon a time I lay by a pool in a forest, nestled in the crook of a tree’s roots. I looked at the sky and wondered to myself why Adam and Eve would eat the apple (snakes don’t talk, you understand); whether humans in a state of innocent grace would really want the knowledge of good and evil. Whether I did, whether we were much improved as we grew up and lost that peculiar quality. Innocence.
When you made choices, when you thought about them, but before you learned to think about thinking about them. Before you developed that peculiar awareness of being aware. Like seeing yourself in the mirror for the first time.
Knowing it was not only your choice, but your choice about how to make choices. The consequences of not only our actions but our existence, the nature of ourselves. The responsibility to be good, or evil - not in the sense that those words are given to us by our parents, by authority (by god, if you’re into that sort of thing) - but in the sense of being someone we want to be, or not.
I used to be so sure. Even though I knew the dangers of certainty, even though I knew and had dealt with doubt - I thought I’d handled all of it, I thought I’d figured it out. Other kids in school would listen to me and say I was deep and listen to me like I had answers. That old saying, about the wisdom of knowing you know nothing - the thing Socrates doesn’t warn you about is how you never really get to the depths of your own ignorance. How it’ll keep surprising you. How there’s so many times you thought you were right, and you got lucky. You just got lucky, and you’ll never appreciate how much until you find the mistake all those other times set you up for.
I thought I loved her, then I was sure I didn’t, then I thought maybe I could after all, then I didn’t…
And now I want to let go and I want to hold on, but either is a prospect terrifying. I’ve been wrong too many times on both. But even still. It’s one or the other.
Loading comments...