Honesty? In more or less words.

I am afraid. And we all are, really, and happy and unhappy too about things that should and should not make us feel the way they make us feel. I want to eat ice cream now, because it's more than warm out. It's hot. I want to wear a shirt and feel cold. I don't want to wear pants. I want to break a dish at the diner and say I broke it because I wanted to, that it was annoying me and so I threw it on the floor and took pleasure in watching it break. Into so many little pieces. Pieces of dish embedded in my soles, maybe. But I'm afraid to do such things. You know, when you're lonely, you do some things that terrify you. I am not lonely, but I do enjoy the company of no one, sometimes.

When I was a kid.

Sometimes I could hear Mom cleaning the kitchen or the bathroom, in the middle of the night. I could hear her scrubbing the floors or organizing the food inside the refrigerator or putting back the dishes. And sometimes, I could smell the cigarette smoke. And I knew that she was smoking and that she would deny it if I asked her in the morning if she had smoked. And once, at a family reunion, I caught her in my parents' bedroom, putting on one of Dad's ties and looking at herself in the mirror. The tie, large and foolish, on her small frame. And she smelled the tie and she might have licked it, just to see what silk tasted like, or maybe to see how my father embedded himself into fabric through fabric. And when she returned to the reunion, she smiled like she knew something wonderful that no one else knew. And she filled a bowl with more french onion dip. And she was always afraid of something. This, I could tell. This, we all could tell.

I wish I could be honest. Really honest. It's hard to be honest. Really honest. Being truthful is much easier than being really honest. Honesty is much more abrasive. Honesty is lying naked in the sun with no sunblock on while truthfulness is lying naked indoors with the air-conditioner on, or maybe a window wide open. I am afraid of honesty.

And so, I lie to myself. I settle for truthfulness and call it honesty.