Storybook Girl
She was six years old when she told her first lie to a crying baby in his cradle. "Everything's going to be okay." Things were never okay, really. Not for long. It was just the way things worked.
She was eleven the first time she got caught lying. George Michael had broken the TV remote. She took the blame and her father's slaps. When he found out she lied to protect her brother, he made her watch as he punished the boy, and then beat her again for lying. Lesson learned? Don't get caught.
She was sixteen the last time she told the truth, a year more bitter than sweet. The wandering hands and demands of a man who called himself the father she never had. Her mother's refusal to acknowledge it. The truth wasn't anything like inconvenient, only useless. You give up a part of yourself every time you give someone an honest answer. So she kept herself, and in doing so, lost her self.
She's twenty-six now. A decade of lying to the world. Putting on the pretty face to hide the hole where a girl used to be. Nothing left inside. But then she hears he's dead, and it's over, and she realizes maybe the one she's lied to most of all is herself. Lies to keep her safe, lies like locks on a door she was too afraid to open. Maybe Gwendolyn isn't dead after all. Maybe when you give yourself away, you find someone else underneath it all, the person you were becoming all along.
She isn't very pretty on the inside, if she's honest with herself. A life of lying takes as much as it lets you keep. There's cracks and bruises and a broken dream. But if she can connect the stars to find the bigger picture in the sky, then maybe somewhere between the pieces of the girl she used to be, she can find the truth of who she is.
She's a girl made of lies. She's pretty and perfect and pretty much perfectly peachy pretending. And that's the honest truth.
She was eleven the first time she got caught lying. George Michael had broken the TV remote. She took the blame and her father's slaps. When he found out she lied to protect her brother, he made her watch as he punished the boy, and then beat her again for lying. Lesson learned? Don't get caught.
She was sixteen the last time she told the truth, a year more bitter than sweet. The wandering hands and demands of a man who called himself the father she never had. Her mother's refusal to acknowledge it. The truth wasn't anything like inconvenient, only useless. You give up a part of yourself every time you give someone an honest answer. So she kept herself, and in doing so, lost her self.
She's twenty-six now. A decade of lying to the world. Putting on the pretty face to hide the hole where a girl used to be. Nothing left inside. But then she hears he's dead, and it's over, and she realizes maybe the one she's lied to most of all is herself. Lies to keep her safe, lies like locks on a door she was too afraid to open. Maybe Gwendolyn isn't dead after all. Maybe when you give yourself away, you find someone else underneath it all, the person you were becoming all along.
She isn't very pretty on the inside, if she's honest with herself. A life of lying takes as much as it lets you keep. There's cracks and bruises and a broken dream. But if she can connect the stars to find the bigger picture in the sky, then maybe somewhere between the pieces of the girl she used to be, she can find the truth of who she is.
She's a girl made of lies. She's pretty and perfect and pretty much perfectly peachy pretending. And that's the honest truth.