Lie to me.

When I graduated college I joyously decided to become nobody. I figured I’d just piss my life away. I thought it would be romantic. I had no desire to be rich, have good credit, respectable or loved. I decided life was one big ass joke. I was already bored of living at twenty two years old.

I know how it sounds: sad, apathetic, lethargic, and unceremonious. Just a verbiage of words now stuck in my head with no real use because of the S.A.T. I hate to appear intelligent. I hate other people faking intelligence. I thought it was just a hustle to be smart. You pretend that you really care about art, the environment and all the boring shit like charity and people think you are a good person.

I thought I would be dead by twenty seven years old. I liked to party, drive fast cars, wanted it to all end in a blaze of young tragedy like a gone too soon moment. I was really morbid.

I figured if I died really young people would say things at my funeral like I had so much potential, that I could’ve been anything, that I had my entire life in front of me. Funny about life, it’s either in front of you like being stuck in traffic or it’s behind you like a horrific dream you can’t remember when you awake screaming but scared you shitless.

The truth, I never really had that much potential. I peaked in kindergarten with my intelligence. I told my first lie. Most don’t remember their first lie. It could be as simple like lying that you didn’t steal the cookie for the jar. My first lie was big. The first day of kindergarten the teacher made each student tell something about their parents. It made me nervous. I was already instructed to lie that I was six years old in fact I was only five years old. It’s a stupid public school rule that a child must be six when the school system begins in the Fall, therefore, if your birthday is late September-December, you are made to wait a year. In other words, if I had waited a year, I would’ve turned seven in kindergarten. It’s stupid. I was being held back before I even began, so I was instructed by my clever soberly-challenged mother to just lie.

The first day of school I was asked about my father. I lied. I didn’t tell anyone my father was dead. Instead I made up a lie about him being a big shot Doctor for the military. It was such a simple lie but it created something brilliantly deceptive. I remember the look on my teacher’s face like I was somebody. I couldn’t tell her my father was a small time drug dealer who got himself shot during a routine robbery. He was robbing the guy. Instead, I lied. It made me feel powerful. I also lied about my mother. I said she was a nurse. Actually my mother was a chronically unemployed crack addict. So I created a different family for myself the first day of kindergarten. I created the possibility that a nappy head snot nosed kid could grow up and be anything in the world. Of course the statistics were against me. 90 percent of those born in poverty stay in poverty their entire life. I had no real role models. With that lie, it seemed as if the entire world opened its arms to me.

I remember that first evil smirk the first day of kindergarten. It was like; shit life was going to be easy. All I had to do was lie.

The problem with the first lie is that it created an alternate reality in my mind that to this day I’m still trying to correct. As a kid, I couldn’t accept the world in which I inherited from my parents. I decided to check out of reality. I started to see the world as I wanted to see it and not for its brutal truth. Once a transitional lie is born, one can sometimes spend an entire life protecting it. I became very loyal to my lies. Every lie I told I was committed to its existence was like social and psychological telekinesis.

I’m lying to you right now. Change the physics of reality, now open your arms before you find out the truth.