27

I grew up questioning the truth. My mother taught me that, and maybe that’s why I’ve blossomed into a compulsive liar.

People will go to the end of the earth to defend the concept of truth. There are beliefs built upon it, jobs centered around the very notion of it. What are morals without truth? They’d just be guidelines granting you total free will in the end. When you think about it, truth is totally subjective. What’s true to one person may be false to someone else. We can twist it around and turn it into something totally different from its original intent, and that’s the beauty of it.

The truth can mean anything we want it to be.

The earth we live on is three dimensional and multi faceted, yet the maps we’ve become accustomed to all have the same rigid standpoint: the Americas are always in the west and Asia is always in the east. In actuality, you can spin the globe any way you want. There are no fixed points in reality. Maybe that’s also why my recollections become such a blur after the age of five. I’m not sure if they’ve ever stopped.

One specific memory comes to mind when I think of my mother. It’s funny; I seem to remember her even less than I remember my father, and she outlived him by a solid year.

I don’t resent my mother, or at least I try not to. That wouldn’t be fair to her. Though she’s completely responsible for her own death, it wasn’t all her fault. She was just weak—and I mean that in the most sympathetic way. That’s what happens to you after trauma. That’s what happens when you’ve subjected yourself to the harsh standards of truth your entire life and only just start to realize that it’s all been pointless. What does the truth even matter when it’ll do you no good?

“Don’t believe what they teach you in school,” I remember her telling me one day when all the blues in the sky faded into pink. Her fingers were long and thin like spider’s legs and she touched everything like it would shatter into a hundred pieces upon fragile contact. She was a gentle soul; that’s why she broke so easily. I never saw her white knuckle anything, not even the steering wheel as we cruised up and down the coast between Malibu and Paso Robles.

The only reason I was familiar with the area was because of the airbase we passed somewhere along the way. I’d pointed to it and yelled in all my excitement, “Look, Ma, that’s where Chuckie let me ride in the helicopter!”

“Sure is, baby,” she said, “Sure is.”

When you’re six years old, ignorance truly is bliss.

I remember the scorched ruins of that independent gas station off the highway, now a pile of forgotten rubble lying in the sand. The sunset burned the mountains ahead of us, red and gold and sienna, and I remember waiting for a phoenix to rise out of their charred caps to come and carry me away. That was my truth. Maybe it’ll happen someday.

“Your history teachers will lie to you,” my mother told me as the sky was set ablaze, “You see this land?”

I saw it alright; I saw it dead and barren, turned into a casino wasteland.

“They’ll tell you that we won this land fair and square. That it’s ours.” She shook her head, but still, her fingers were gentle. “It’s not. It never was. But they’ll tell you anything and make it out to be the truth, just to shake the blame off themselves.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I listened intently nonetheless.

“The truth is a funny thing,” she went on, “The truth is that we were the real savages.”

I never stopped waiting for that phoenix.

“The truth is, this is what happens when you play God.”

For that year after my dad died, my mother was strangely fixated on the Chumash reservation. It didn’t occur to me why until several years later, but that tribe was the catalyst of her unraveling, like karma catching up to the sins our ancestors committed.

She died the next night of a heroin overdose. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

That was the truth I chose to believe. That’s all our lives are composed of, really, just sifting through different acclaimed truths until we find the ones that suit us. Maybe we accept everything thrust at us, and maybe we settle for nothing. Maybe that’s where it all went wrong for me in the first place.

What if everything I’ve recalled to you up to this point has been a lie; just one long chain of falsehoods spewed one after another until the line between fiction and reality becomes nonexistent?

Would you still trust me?