Theatrical Muse Reboot - #47 - What is the biggest lie you ever told? What were the consequences?
I should probably be ashamed that the answer to this isn't immediately apparent to me. Honestly--and there's a complete truckload of irony in this statement I guess--I lie a lot. Well. Ha ha ha, this just keeps getting better, because the thing is that particular statement aside I don't actually indulge in straight-up lies that often. Most of the time I just kind of twist the truth around to my liking; I'm far more likely to distract someone with only a part of the whole and a brilliant smile than actually straight up lie. I find it is a lot easier to get people to swallow things when it isn't actually a fabrication, because making shit up has this tendency for things to get just a little out of hand. The more you make up the more you have to remember what you've made up and told someone, and although I have an excellent memory even at the worst of times there's just only so much mental collation you can do before it's too much to keep track of. It's like that Emily Dickinson poem: "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant, success in circuit lies. Too bright for our infirm delight the truth's superb surprise. As lightening to children eased with explanation kind, the truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind--" I am of wholehearted support of this idea. Too much at once and people just can't swallow it down. Some things are going to especially stick in the craw without a lot of working up to it. After all, how big a piece of meat is 'I'm a werewolf' to swallow? Pretty fucking enormous, I'm pretty sure.
Anyway, it is probably pertaining to that particular point where I would account my biggest lie. Even if I thought people would believe me I couldn't tell that one to every passer-by. Hell, maybe especially if I thought people would believe me. Humanity has an amazing propensity for tending to go one of two ways when encountering something new: either destroy it because it is strange and different, or figure out every detail and nuance of how it works because it is new and wonderful. While there is a lot to be said for the power of the curious simian mind, neither of those fallouts sound like a particularly good time to me. Either I'm just DEAD, which is most literally the endgame for all of my happy fun time on this little floating marble, or I'm in the process of being poked, prodded and vivisected in the name of SCIENCE!! I am really especially not keen on the thought of that one because I am reasonable certain that I could survive several rounds of vivisection if the vivisecter was discriminate. Is there such a thing as performing a vivisection with discretion? I don't know, but I am certain I don't want to find out. No one needs to experience having their stomach removed ONCE, much less SEVERAL TIMES. God, I can just see it now, rows of captive werewolves used as some kind of freakish organ factory for the transplant business. I just fucking know someone would go down that road and the very idea makes my blood run cold. Makes my skin crawl. I think I'm going to start thinking about something else before I make myself nauseous about this.
As for consequences, the use of that word makes me rather think you're looking for a negative experience related to this lie. I can't really say I regret not being put in a cage and experimented on, so I'm going to disqualify that as a 'consequence' for the time being. I also can't really say it's effected much of my personal life, since the people who are closest to me already know my big looming secret and, on account of sharing it with me, could not really care less that I'm a werewolf. But maybe it has had the effect of keeping that inner circle very small. It's hard to have an ongoing, meaningful relationship with someone when you literally have to hide an entire half of your life an existence--maybe it's more like hiding four-fifths of myself--from them at any given moment. I'm not real good with what you'd traditionally call commitment or fidelity anyway, and adding into it the mix that I have to skulk around for reasons wholly irrelated to sex, well. You get a reputation and I guess your partner starts making some assumptions about what's going on at night. After all, it's a lot easier to believe that your boyfriend is a cheating douchebag of a horndog than it is to believe he just turned into a wolf and went to hunt something that shouldn't exist over the streets of Los Angeles.
Christ. My life is so complicated sometimes.