Lola Lied

I'm not a cook. I know my strengths and weaknesses and I have no problem admitting that cooking falls into the latter category. Smoke and oven fires are commonplace, as are the shrill sound of the smoke alarm and the carcinogenic char stuck to the side of the meat dish.

Lying has never been my specialty, either. I've gone through phases, dabbled in a huge ass lie or two but I quite suck at it. If my extremely guilty body language doesn't immediately give it away then I will surely pay my penance at night when I lay my head down to try and sleep through my guilt. It just doesn't happen. And quite honestly, (he he) in my experience I have found that a) the pain caused by the lie almost always exceeds the pain found in the truth and, b) truth always comes out anyway. It just does. Maybe not the way we imagine it to surface but it does ooze out in some capacity or another and I know that we all know this. So why do we keep doing it?

Because we're human. We have pride, we have excuses, we have perfectly self-validated reasons for lying and now we're so good at it that it would be a shame to stop. It's addicting. It fulfills our need to be something other than who we are. But then it hides who we really are, and all our pride and excuses and reasons and addictions grow larger than life and all of a sudden we've disappeared altogether. And we're alone. We have nobody left around us to lie to. 

Freddy reminded me tonight of the time we lost "Lola" our red corn snake. One moment she was throwing down mice in her tank and the next she was gonezo. We went on a snake-rampage, searching every little corner of the house, imagining where a little snakey might hide but we kept coming up with nothing. We eventually gave up. Days passed. Weeks passed.

And then one day I sat down on the floor in the computer room to go through my school binders to find an old assignment and when I flipped open the pages, Lola was found folded, chilling and peaceful along the spine of the binder. I fucking FREAKED. I screamed and jumped and threw the binder in the air. The kids ran over to laugh at me and to collect their beloved pet.

Truth comes out. Lies can hide in cool dark corners but nothing charms them to the surface better than a bit of light. And then once they surface we can let go of all that worry that weighs us down, of when it'll show up, and where, and how much will it hurt? Because once it's out, we're light and free and able to go on living.