Truths and Lies
You look at the monster in front of you. It looks like you. No, it looks exactly like you, down to the smallest molecule.
But it isn’t you. Although you’re beginning to doubt it.
The monster speaks. Or you speak. You’re not sure, since no one opened their mouths and the voice that came out sounded like yours. But you’re not sure that it’s yours.
“The truth,” the monster says. Or you say. “This is the truth about you. About me.”
You frown. The monster frowns too. You’re pretty sure the monster is lying. He’s a monster, after all. But, you think to yourself, you’ve never seen the truth. Maybe it looks like a monster. Maybe it looks like a lie.
“The truth,” you both say. Or the monster. Or just you. “The truth is that the world is shit, and everything in the world is shit. Time is shit. The past is shit. The present is shit. The future is shit. And you’re shit. You’re especially shit, because you think you’re the only one that knows that the world is shit. But everyone knows. Everyone has always known. You’re the only one that just found out. You’re the only one that doesn’t know how to deal with it. With your hope. With your disappointment. With the fact that you’re weak, and have always been weak, and will always be weak. How pathetic.”
You don’t know how to respond. Or how to continue. It makes sense, you think. Deep within you, you know this is the truth. It makes sense. But at the same time, it makes too much sense. Like a lie engineered to sound like the truth.
But you know the truth always sounds like a lie. So which is it?
“You know what you have to do,” you say to yourself. Or maybe it was the monster. “So do it. Do it. Do it.”
You begin to sweat. You cannot breathe. Or maybe it’s the monster that cannot breathe, and you just feel afraid for it. Afraid of it.
You have to do it. You’d be a coward not to do it. You feel it deeply in your heart.
You can’t do it. You’d be a coward to do it. You feel it deeply in your heart.
Choose. “Choose.” Choose.
So you choose. You jump fiercely towards the monster, hugging it tightly. Hugging yourself tightly. “This is the truth,” you say to yourselves. “This is the truth.”
“Yes,” the monster repeats, holding you tightly. You feel as its claws — your claws — embed themselves on your back, digging into your heart. You let out a small cry of pain. You can feel the taste of thick, bitter blood on your mouth. You begin to sink into the darkness.
“Yes,” you repeat, the monster repeats, murmuring. “This is the truth. This is the truth. This is the truth.”
But as you begin to drown, as the claws dig deeper into your heart and the darkness begins to seep into your lungs and eyes and ears and nose and mouth, you cannot help but think that that sounds like a lie.
