tired perfection

The lies are ready on your lips, practiced, you done this a thousand times, but you falter. You falter and shatter the illusion of truth. You’ve lied many times before, no hesitation, believable lies, practiced, perfect, but this time you falter. It wasn’t even something complicated or on the spot, you had this lie ready. 

The lie would have rolled off your lips, but you hesitated, why? Now they know you don’t want to tell them, they know you were doing something wrong, you knew this would happen, but you faltered. 

You're just tired, you realize. The lie would have come, but you don’t want to put in the effort. This one little lie that you won’t even remember, makes you pause. Not because you’ve grown a conscience, like that will happen, but because you’re just tired.

You wonder if your lying will continue to fail, if you will continue to falter, how long you can keep up your charade. Will it crack after all these years? 

Wow, you’ve been doing this for years, lying, hiding, manipulating. Was there ever a time you didn’t lie? You try to think back, but you don’t like what you find. You’ve always been a liar. 

Sure way back then it was few and far between and often not effective, but that amount has only increased as you’ve gotten older, same with your proficiency. 

You remember back to a time when you were still very young and always got a sick feeling in your stomach when you lied. You remember that feeling being less and less strong, until you only felt it some of the time, then never at all. 

You remember back to a time when you almost always got caught lying. You remember getting better at hiding things, learning tricks to make your lies more believable, almost never getting caught. 

You remember getting better at sneaking around, at making lies you could more easily recall, at planning, at improvising, at changing your body language. You look back and can almost tell when you started living the lie.

But today you faltered. Years and years of experience, of practice, and you messed up. Each big mess up is something you remember, something you learn from. You adapt and get better. But this time you failed because you were tired. 

Maybe after all this time you will finally collapse under the weight of your words. But maybe you’ll get over this, create simple lies, technical truths, you already technically tell the truth sometimes. And, just a few weeks ago you delved into manipulation; actually using tactics to make someone do something and not just using it to try to convince people of your lies. 

You don’t know if you will be able to hold it together, but you know one thing for certain. You will cling to your mask until it shatters in your grip and then you’ll continue to grasp at the shards, even when everyone sees the blood on your hands.