Look Closer

by David Ellis

The best lies are the ones closest to the truth.

It’s all coming back, washing over me again. It’s growing like a tumor inside me, poison flowing through my veins.

This one goes to a lot of trouble to look like he didn’t go to a lot of trouble.

I like your darkness. I like being your light.

Am I punishing myself, allowing myself to get wrapped up in you again and knowing that you’ll just leave me again? Am I barreling toward a cliff? Sometimes I feel that way, when I’m lying in bed at night, thinking about what we’re doing and where we’re headed, plagued with this sense of disbelief that anything like this could be real. I question your love. I question your commitment. I convince myself that you will wake up one day, ask yourself what is so great about me, and not like the answer.

A stupid bottle of champagne, two red-tinted plastic champagne flutes you’d buy at a convenience store. Those things told me that my father wasn’t just a weak man who succumbed to a moment of temptation—he was a liar. He was a cheat. His carnal needs were more important than his commitment to my mother, to our family.

I have become the man I despise.

I was able to move on. Not heal. But move on. Move on but remember.

“Don’t speak unless you have something to say,” she used to say to me during our talks when she tucked me in. “But when you do choose to speak, say what you mean, mean what you say, and be ready to support your points. If you can’t support your point of view, then it wasn’t much of a point of view to begin with.”

Because I’ve let my life be controlled by what others have done, and my inexplicable need to settle the score, and okay, inside my own internal courtroom, I make the rules, I am judge, jury, and prosecutor, fine, but that’s my fucked-up internal world, not my job.

But that’s what you do with the people you love. You trust them. You trust them until they prove you wrong. Until they betray you. And then, you react however you’re wired to react.

He listened to everything I had to say. He listened to me talk about the sister that I loved more than I ever realized after her death,

The brilliance of the law is that it’s not concerned with one person but with a system applicable to all. It protects the guilty so it can protect the innocent. It protected me, the guilty, from prosecution twice now.

Her smile breaks wide as she approaches. Something inside me breaks as well.