Rowena Russell

Crying wolf

Mom always said “if you keep lying, you’ll lose track of what’s true”. She was right – people had always believed my beautiful stories, loving me all the while. She regularly recalled one Saturday morning years ago - I was just a toddler. Entering the bathroom, she found the medicine cabinet open. On the floor, toothpaste tubes squeezed into stripy snakes, pills scattered like M&Ms, and me, an adorable puppy-dog look on my face, a hint of a smile, smeared with liquid Tylenol, my wide brown eyes gauging her reaction. “Not me, mommy!” Even after the raging and hand-wringing that followed, half the weekend squandered at the emergency room, that day was immortalised in her mind as evidence of my irresistible charm, though most relatives felt it marked the beginning of my unrelenting hedonism, my casual relationship with the truth. Now, I’d crafted a vocation out of it. People didn’t want to hear the truth; often it was downright destructive.