The Boy Who Lied

 

I was 21 and my idea of sin was throwing up after night of drinking. When he walked into my life, the drama of him excited me. He was bad and I knew it, but I chose him anyways. I was playing with fire, toying with the flames, and mad as hell when I got burned. We were DOA, but it was like he was my heroin. Our highs were mountain tall and our lows were saturated in gasoline burning in flames. No matter how bad it got, I always needed a little bit more. I would quit eventually. But we were trapped in a volatile cycle between euphoria and disaster.

At first, I admired him for his honesty, but he was a storyteller. I guess now I can appreciate that. Eventually, I learned the phrases to look out for. “Do you want the truth or do you want me to tell you what you want to hear” Automatic Lie. “You believe what you want, I know the truth” Automatic lie. It was almost like the game Two Truths and a Lie where he learned to disguise his betrayal by burying his lies in half honesties.

By the time I had figured him out, it was too late. I had already reached a point of no return. It was a very horrifying feeling waking up not knowing who the person sleeping next to me was. I could have made the choice to leave at that moment, but I chose to stay. I judged my friends in toxic relationships in the past. JUST LEAVE, I told them. It’s so simple! Leave! And here I was, every time I tried to break free, gravity pulled me right back into his orbit.

I loved him equally as much as I hated him. I was learning about this whole other person that I did not recognize. It didn’t make sense that he could be two people at once and I needed to believe that the one that I loved was the one that was real. I had to believe he never meant to hurt me, that he was not this cruel of a person, that I was not this blind and naive. Each time I found the courage to say “enough”, I saw this agonizing heartbreak in his eyes while his body was shaking from fear that I might actually leave and I always agreed. “Ok. One last chance.” Until the next time. And the time after that. There would always be one last time. I was the village idiot, the court jester for all the town to mock. “How many more times would she let him stab her before she finally takes away his knife?” 

The more I accepted that the man I thought he was didn’t really exist and the more resentful I became, but I still loved the man I created in my mind. So instead of leaving him, I tried to fix him. He wasn’t what I needed, but I could get him there. But I still couldn’t separate his lies from reality. Two truths and a lie just felt more like 3 lies and a fool.

I kept trying to fix something that was irreparably broken, save someone that didn’t want to be rescued. He entertained the idea that I was helping him as long as it would make me stay. I was turning his life into my own little project. No matter how much of myself I poured into him, there was no way to save us from the flatline.

By the end, I had sat so long in burning flames that what little was left of me was stone cold and callous. Now when I saw the heartbreak in his eyes, I felt nothing. I had “left” without ever leaving. In my mind, I was no longer “his”. Nothing I did could feel like betrayal. He had done too much to ever deserve my empathy, or remorse. I had picked up all the same parts of him that I was so resentful of. By the end, he couldn’t look at me without crying and I knew however much he hurt me was no contest for the damage I had done. I had become everything that I hated.

Looking back, I knew almost nothing real about him. I couldn’t separate the fictions from the truths. I don’t have memories of a real person, just the story I had created of this broken man I had believed I could save. There was just one thing I knew for absolute certain, he loved me deeply. But what we were dealing with was bigger than love. I no longer understand love as an equation. I don’t believe that you can reduce human emotion to a universal  Do’s and Don’ts list. It oversimplifies the profound complexity of the human mind. Before this, I looked at people in an extremely idealistic way. I couldn’t just accept someone for the way they were. I saw the way people were supposed to be or what they could be. I had believed that a testament of true love was whether you were  capable of putting their happiness above your own. I believed a person would break their own heart before they allowed themselves to cause  pain to any person they loved.

There is a scene in Bruce Almighty that I used to day dream about.

God: Grace. You want her back? 

Bruce: No. I want her to be happy, no matter what that means. I want her to find someone who will treat her with all the love she deserved from me. I want her to meet someone who will see her always as I do now, through Your eyes.

I thought if he really loved me he would want this for me. He would let me go.

I don’t believe that selfishness negates the validity of love. He couldn’t be himself with me because I wouldn’t let him. But he also didn’t want to live without me. Do I wish he would have done the selfless thing and let me go when he knew he could not live up to the ideals I had created for him? Yes. Do I understand why he didn’t? Yes.

I could have chosen to walk away, but I couldn’t. Love and rationality can’t co-exist.