Hello, Sunshine

by Laura Dave

“No, you’re not hearing me. It did matter. Because no one becomes terrible all at once. It happens in very small increments. And it paved the way. That little lie. It helped you tell a lot of important lies.”

“So? That’s pretty much par for the course when living a public life these days. There’s no time to tell the truth. Everyone’s the New York Post, posting the catchiest headline they can think of. A little imagination and you can make yourself the story of the day. Even when there’s no real news.”

There was a lesson in that, which Z had taught me, about what we should pay attention to instead. About taking a hard look at what we are willing to throw away, about what we should be letting it show us.

We are and we aren’t. We try and we fail. We tell the truth and then we lie. We want to be a part of things so badly that we’ll pretend to be anyone to get into the room. And pretend to be someone else just to stay there. We want to be seen and we want people to guess. We want them to understand. We want to be forgiven. We forgive ourselves. We start again.