Prompt #11

The Prompt: Let me tell you a lie.

The first time I told a lie I was six. I’d just broken my grandmother’s favorite vase playing Frisbee with my brother in the house even though we were both old enough to know better. He scrammed and left me to take the blame so I did what any child would have done. I smiled at her innocently and blamed the dog.

Or maybe the first lie I told was when I was four. I was plenty old enough to eat my own food, but refused to eat anything green. Carrots were fine, green gummy bears were not. It had nothing to do with texture or health, I just hated the color green. So when my dad came home and asked if I’d been good and eaten all my veggies, I did what any self respecting four year old would have done. I gave him a big hug and told him of course I had.

But that might not be right either. What if the first lie I told was when I was twelve and for the first time failed a test. The teacher asked me why and I wasn’t about to tell her I’d been online with my friends the whole night before so I smiled innocently and told her I’d studied an hour a night for the previous week.

But is any of that important? Does it matter if I was four or six or twelve? Does the when matter? I did it, I lied. That’s all that is important. Or is the why also important? That I lied to get out of trouble, for my own good, to make people view me better. I don’t need those excuses anymore. A good lie can be for any reason at all.

None of this matters to you. You aren’t here to listen to the story of my lies. That doesn’t interest you. You’re here for a story. To be entertained. So here’s my story.

I was fourteen. A normal fourteen year old with normal fourteen year old friends. And then my life changed suddenly when my friend died in a car crash, hit by a drunk driver going home from school one evening. Everything turned upside down. Everything that felt good and right disappeared.

She was gone. She left a hole in my world. Nothing fit anymore. The puzzle that was my life wasn’t only missing a piece, but it seemed as though it had been reshaped. Tragedies like that happen all over the world, but they aren’t supposed to happen to you. Never in your life.

But they do. And nothing’s ever right again. It changes you, changes the way you view the world. Maybe that’s what made me the way I am.

Only that’s not entirely true. It wasn’t my friend, it was my sister. She was closer to my heart than anyone else in the world. She was my closest confidante and my best friend. We told each other everything. Except her one secret. She was unhappy and never told me even though I told her everything.

She took her own life and I never knew, never suspected. My own sister and closest friend and I didn’t have a clue. It broke my heart. Changed me forever.

Did you like that? Feel any tugs on your heart strings? Entertaining enough for your liking?  Were you invested in my life and my story, perhaps? I thought it might have more impact if I switched it from my friend to my sister. Was I right? Did it add more to my sob story? My poor sister. It could have even been true if I weren’t an only child.

I’m sorry, am I toying with your emotions? Do you not like being manipulated into feeling for me and my lies? Then why did you continue reading? I’m a liar. Lying is what I do. You knew that from the first sentence. I’m probably the most honest liar in the world. And you kept reading anyway. Doesn’t that say more about you than it does about me?

Think about that while you sit there feeling judging me. You want to be lied to, to hear the stories. You just don’t like the liars.