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It’s the truth, which means I’m off-balance. In situations like this, the truth is what we offer when we don’t have anything better.
Oliver and I, however, were less a violent plunge and more like subtle slippage. An exsanguination so slow, ignoring it comes far too easy. Determined to numb one more bad hour, we didn’t realize we’d numbed our way through one more bad day. One more bad year, numbed. How many do we have left?
“We’re in a bad spot, but aren’t those what define love? The downs, how you manage and endure them because who the hell has trouble with the ups? This, right now”—I splay my fingers on the table—“is the shit nobody talks about because it’s hard.”
Anonymity breeds apathy. When you’re anonymous, no one cares to save you.
The intimacy of sex mirrors the intimacy of murder. At least murder that requires one to use one’s hands. To breathe into his ear. The French call orgasm “the little death.” Is this what they had in mind?
When it comes to lying, there’s a golden rule: tell as much truth as you can. The truth is, after all, the easiest to remember. It’s the most consistent with inarguable fact.
Her driver stays silent. Kept quiet by the Gilded Age sensibilities Mother carries like an Hermès handbag.
“Did you practice this speech on the ride over, or does Joan Crawford just come naturally?”
This society, it swallows up smart people. If you’re smart—and not a sociopath—you don’t stand a chance.
What’s the point of knowingly bemoaning your misplaced guilt without an audience to feed the narcissistic histrionics?
Sometimes the price tag on betrayal is deceptively small.
An inflection point. Nothing will ever be the same. The instant when the intricate costume you’ve woven for yourself unspools and suddenly, you’re naked. Only the truth remains. Except you’ve told so many lies and been so duplicitous in so many directions that even as the reckoning burns through, the truth isn’t what’s left behind, is it? Because for someone like you, there is no such thing.
When something bad has teeth in your heart, you can either tear free or die. And there’s no pain worse than deciding to live. Ripping your thumping, beating self out from clamped jaws—that kind of hurt doesn’t stop with scar tissue. Maybe it dulls as decades pass, like folks say, but the pieces of flesh you leave behind never grow back.
Before opening my own front door to my own home where my own mistake-riddled life starts its next chapter, I think about when I turned this very bottle upside down—and the tiny slice of something good inside me that did it. The truth is supposed to set you free, but sometimes it’s not the truth that saves you. Prescribed by Dr. Nathan Klein. It’s the lies.
