Prose 01/04/2010: We Lie

We lie close together, swaddled in an ocean of white blankets, on a bed made for a queen. She was well covered, with just her head crowning through the top, like an infant soon to be released from the womb. She pulled the covers down to reveal herself to me, with a saddened expression.
Why do people lie? she asked.
I was caught off guard. She was not asking me of my actions, or to somehow explain something I may have observed about herself. She wanted to know something deeper than my base of knowledge, and I didn’t have an answer. Only speculation and guess. Before I could even begin to open my mouth, she continued.
Not why do people lie to cover things up, mind you. Why do they lie just to do it? Why do they put themselves in those situations, where they are forced to fabricate a reality that isn’t so?
I don’t know, I said. For sport, maybe. I think that some people enjoy it. Much like writing, but without the pen and paper. A kind of applied fiction, or even some kind of advanced Existentialism. Maybe they’re creating a world for themselves contrary to the one that’s been provided them.
She wasn’t looking at me this whole time. She seemed inward. She was somewhere far away, and my words were reaching her via radio wave and transmission. She was somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy, gazing to the Heavens and looking for answers. I was in the Heavens, and I didn’t have a fucking clue.
But it isn’t real, she continued. They can create themselves a history, or they can tell people (and themselves) that something is a way it isn’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that their words are merely words. No, I don’t think lying is a form of alternate living. I feel it’s the antithesis of living. It’s a receding from life. You’re taking a step backwards from the truth. It just seems like some people can’t live an honest life. Like they are afraid of the life that was meant for them, so they go the other way. It takes courage to be honest. You must be brave to be yourself unwaveringly. If you can’t even be honest about whom you are, then who are you?
She was wise like a child. She was unafraid of who she was. She lived her truth, heart on her sleeve, with no shame or mercy. She was brave. She was courageous. And I felt a tiny bit ashamed, I will admit, of every lie I had ever told in my entire life. Not because she would have scolded me, and or because she would have withheld from me if she knew every fault of my past, but because in that moment she had spoken a truth that does what truths always do: it had revealed. It had moved in me the importance of being earnest and true.
I moved in closer to her, and beneath the sheath in which we were, I wrapped my arms around her torso. As I held her, I felt the warmth spread through me. And there we were face to face, as if in fort we’d made. I kissed her lips and looked her in the eye. I will never lie to you, I told her. I was telling the truth.