The Unrevealed

I’ve been lied to a lot. I’ve been looked in the eye, smiled at, laughed with, and lied to, and honestly it’s a show worth the price of admission. It’s a unique experience to know a factual and provable truth while someone feeds you an alternate one that they invented all on their own. Deceit is not unlike murder, but instead of taking a life you mutilate it. You take what’s real and true and you turn it into a blindfold, you tie it over the person’s eyes, take hold of their hand, and lead their unsure, shuffling steps into a cage doused with the sweetest smells of childhood. However, the fragrant aroma is rendered charmless once the flame from the welder’s torch is ignited to seal the contraption shut. Luckily, for those who fall victim, the blindfold cannot stay tied on indefinitely.

Maybe you relent and remove it, maybe it falls off accidentally, or maybe the one who is blinded rips the blindfold from their face in biting suspicion. Regardless of how it happens, at the moment their sight is restored they are then faced with a new, undistorted truth: they were made into a slave. The act of deception locks away their ability to make an informed decision, and when they have been robbed of that element, they have been robbed of their liberty. To lie is to attempt to enslave.

I was a slave once. I was an ignorant believer of invented truths stained with ill intent, and I was almost permanently ensnared. I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that those closest to me would never willfully misuse my trust, but I was wrong. I wanted to believe that with patience and understanding the lies would stop, but it can never be foreseen whether patience will inspire altruism or sadism. If not for decisive intervention it was a lesson that I may have never learned, although I experienced the solidity of the consequences. How many layers to a lie could I uncover? There was only one way to find out. A masochistic spirit seethed within me driven by unrelenting curiosity, desperate to know if my eyes could adjust to the abysmal darkness they’d been dipped into. My obsession for plunging a shovel into the shallow graves of buried secrets bordered closely on addiction.

There was always the initial offense—the sound of my ego splintering as I realized that I, of all people, could be taken hostage by the fraudulent—and that was always the worst of it. Fortunately that hadn’t happened in maybe four or five years, because four or five years ago I was presented with an item on par with Icarus returning to Earth with fire.

...

It was my niece, who was only nine years my junior, that for my 31st birthday handed me a gift neatly wrapped in vintage, sepia newspaper and tied with a bow of natural twine. It was nearly a shame to have to disturb it, so I handled the unwrapping process like I was disabling a live explosive device.

“Uncle, you know you can rip the paper, right? That is what it’s there for.”

“Shh! My birthday.”

Slowly revealing itself, like the tips of green grass through melting white snow, was a black, hardcover notebook held closed by a flat, black elastic band. My living room lights highlighted the pebbled, leather finish that was smooth yet textured to the touch. When I turned the notebook so that the spine faced away from me, my eyes widened at the sparkling gold paint that was lightly dusted onto the edges of the pages on all sides. To say it was beautiful was an understatement.

“I don’t know what to say. This is...amazing, Xarissa. Seriously, thank you.”

My brother, as always, beat her to a response.

“Aww, you gon’ make Tone cry.”

“Man, I’m not crying. You crying!”

Xarissa and her girlfriend, Carina; my brother Jackson and his wife, Sarah; my sister Glory and my other niece Bella; my twin sisters Terra and Paula; my cousins Marcus and Gerald; and my lone nephew Xavier and his girlfriend, Maria, all laughed. Xarissa could then finally respond.

“Now, you know I give the best gifts, right? Figured you could use something new to scribble in.”

“Always.”

“Don’t forget my birthday’s in two months. Just saying.”

After a few hours and almost two bottles of tequila later, everyone had wished me a third or fourth happy birthday, taken a plate of food or dessert, and departed on their way. It had been a while since I had a family birthday party at home, and it was nice just sitting around, eating, catching-up, and cracking jokes. I also didn’t have to pretend as much to be happy; for a moment I was. I stacked the dishes in the sink where they’d have to sleep until I felt like washing them in the morning, and I grabbed my new notebook from the coffee table and sat on the couch. This time I opened it and was greeted by the soft crackling sound that resembled milk being poured over Rice Krispies Cereal—the song of a new notebook. As I picked up the first pen that I saw waiting around with nothing better to do, I thought about writing something. But unlike the old cliché I wasn’t much of an articulate creative under the influence of alcohol. I honestly didn’t know if I was much of an articulate creative outside of the influence either.

Since I was around ten years old I had been an amateur poet who consistently wrote inconsistently. It wasn’t anything I ever considered turning into a career, just a way to flip the cookie jar of my thoughts upside down and shake out the leftover crumbs. I stared at the page a moment longer, tapped it with my pen like a magician tapping their top hat with their wand, but there was no magic. In consolation I decided that I could, and should, write my full name on the inside cover to claim the elegant notebook as my own—Anthony Worthy.

What happened next I could never explain. Below my name, slowly materializing without me touching the page or pen, was line after line of writing. The notebook was writing in itself. I watched as it happened and felt my heart beating in my chest like it was an inch away from finally breaking through my body. The first two lines were from a week ago, March 12, 2021; I knew the conversation.

“Baby, you’re not really still entertaining her, are you?”

“Mom, why would I lie to you? I only called her to talk about Sonny. That’s it. Swear.”

It was something I said verbatim. My Mom made me promise not to call my wife—ex-wife—Rosa anymore for any reason. I told her I’d only call Rosa if it had something to do with our dog Sonny, but I lied. To her face. And the notebook knew about it? How the hell was this possible? What was this thing?!

Every line was the same: a date, a question or statement, and a lie that I’d told or a truth that I’d hidden. The page was turned into a burlap sack bulging with words I wished never escaped my lips. When the notebook finally stopped I counted my indiscretions, and there were 22 of them. Was I dreaming? Maybe I passed out. I didn’t remember drinking that much though, then again, maybe that was the problem. I felt tired. Like the fact that I just watched a notebook write in itself had removed my brain through my nose and then blended it into a pulpy juice. But apparently it was done now. I had to be dreaming. I had to be asleep.

As gently as I could, I closed the notebook and placed it on my coffee table like it was a newborn baby I was laying into a crib—I didn’t want to awaken it again. I stared at it blankly, then tiptoed away towards the short hallway that led to my bedroom. Maybe if I went to bed I could wake up out of this bizarre dream.

...

It took awhile for the shock of what I possessed to wear off, but when it did life became increasingly more eventful. I never spoke to Rosa again; I no longer had to lie to my mother about that. I wrote her name down shortly after my own and discovered she’d been cheating on me with her ex, and divulging to him any humiliating story about me she could think of. To my face she was assuring me that she wanted to fix our relationship and that she loved me. I found out later she only continued to speak so sweetly with me so I’d go easy on her in the divorce—her and her ex deserved each other. He abused her mentally and physically when they were together; she told me I was her hero. I guess that was fiction as well. The easiest person to lie to is a loved one because they’re the ones who want to trust you the most. There are truly malicious and heartless people in this world, and they aren’t the ones screaming “I hate you,” they’re the ones whispering “I love you.”

The notebook and I crowded half of its capacity with varying degrees of the unrevealed before my borderline addiction seemed to burn the water from the riverbed of my soul. I trusted no one. Trust was a lazy concept, a waste of effort, a waste of consideration. Yet, the baking drought within me ignited a blaze I could never have imagined: I began to write feverishly. Locked away from humanity and their fallacies that entangled themselves like jungle vines between the twisted strands of their DNA, I wrote. Each fabrication that I spun into verse, and ballad, and sonnet, and haiku clothed me against a world furnished with people that were as cold as the lies that glaciated my heart.

For over two years I wrote in solitude. I sold my condo, took the money, moved to Mexico, and wrote. Everything. When I finally peeled my fingers away from my laptop there was a dark, deep, and cathartic collection staring back at me. Thousands of poems transcribed from my experience with the gold dusted pages of my notebook made flesh and bone of all that haunted me. I was an emptied vessel, and the ghosts of the graveyard I trudged through for the past three years now cleared my vision like morning dew being wiped clean from a window pane. It was Falsehood Theory come to life: the lies and truths were no different than one another. Both were stories we chose to believe or deny. I wasn’t the only one who needed to read this.

Following seventy-two rejection letters I finally had a literary agent. Within three months my book of poetry, The Obscured Observed, was picked up by Random House a week before my birthday. By that time my on and offline following was substantial due wholly to my agent who knew, what I considered to be, real life sorcerers in marketing and PR. He was a puppet master. Although the money from my condo went a long way in Mexico, I had spent most of it on tequila, marijuana, LSD, the freshest seafood I’d ever had prepared for me, and every streaming subscription I could sign up for. Thankfully my puppet master of an agent was pulling strings like he was crocheting a sweater. When I made the trip back to the US for the contract signing I was being smirked and winked at by a $20,000 advance. I was physically overcome. And if the tears of joy I shed on that day had a name I could write into my notebook, the page would rest easy in tranquil silence.