Nothing But Lies

I still remember that fateful day when I found an obituary eerily reminding me of you while scrolling through a writing publication I released articles in before. Odd, because the person mentioned there was born half a decade before you. He was also, well, a guy. But he had a good heart and a hardworking soul, both like the ones I saw in you.

Upon seeing this deathly reminder, I couldn’t help but wonder if you were okay. I hadn’t thought too much of looking into you for months despite thinking of you quite a bit. The idea of doing so only felt like a way to let all the guilt about how we ended up - that I suppressed to function - back up to the surface.

Yet the concern of what might have happened to you overpowered my suppressed emotions. Life is impermanent, after all, and the young aren’t exempt from death. So I looked your name up and found that apparently, one of my worst fears had come true: you were well and truly gone from this Earth. Slain by your own hand, in fact.

I didn’t want to believe the news at first. Sure, you had some pretty hefty mental health issues when I knew you. Dear lord, did I ever regret not properly checking on you when I sold you out with my hands tied.

But things seemed to be taking an upward turn when we stopped talking. Besides, you were having the time of your life with your cool new friends and your dream group art project last time I checked.

Guess that wasn’t true, after all. Regardless of if things improved, they sure came down crashing pretty quickly once you and your new colleagues couldn’t get along. You started to hate them and they…disliked you, to say the least. And not helping matters was an ex of yours haunting you for months before eventually giving up...and then starting again.

It didn’t take long for all that guilt I bottled up to come spilling out. Why did I get myself into this? Would you have been better off without me? What if I had done more to help people in our circles get along back then? Hell, did I contribute to this horrific end?

Yet just as quickly as regrets can flow in, new information can also stamp them out. Because just a few days after I discovered the seemingly horrible announcement of your apparent death, it turned out you were not only alive - but cheerily faked it all along.

Part of me, sickeningly sanguine as it was, felt hopeful that maybe you finally wanted a fresh start away from all the turmoil of your past life. Messed up as your worrying deception was, perhaps it was just a misguided attempt to cope with the things your clouded judgement couldn’t deal with.

That hope was soon dashed, though. You didn’t give a damn about how you impacted anyone. Not your friends, not the recent former ones, left to wonder if they or their allies had a part in your spiraling, not even anyone you had actually wronged. Nope. It was all fun and games to you.

And to add further insult to injury? While your people desperately tried to reason with you, you condoned horrid deeds when it comes to the deepest desires of humans in front of them.

This stranger - whoever’s soul occupies your body - isn’t the person I thought I knew. You and I, we were part of a team to take down the kind of people you then proceeded to happily support. I can only hope you were lying about supporting those heinous actions to throw your opponents off. But either way, they absolutely shouldn’t have heard that instead of answers.

So now I wonder: was our bond nothing but lies? Because tenuous as I felt it was, it did feel real once.

Now, though…I’m not so sure.

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