Don't Lie to Me

Or, “I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like…” -Eminem

You’ve been thinking a lot about this, about what it actually feels like when your trust in someone erodes. It usually happens slowly, slowly, slowly, when wave after wave crashes into the face of the cliff. You don’t notice anything but the crash of the water and splash of white caps flying through the air, and it stays this way for a long time. But what you can’t see is that not even the strongest rocks in the world remain unchanged when hit repeatedly with the force of the ocean. The face of that cliff is getting thinner. At some point in the future, it will be unrecognizable to what it once was.

And it kind of feels like that.

//

You’re on an airplane, barely able to keep your eyes open from the 3:00am wake up call to get to the airport on time. You lean back against the seat, finally finding that elusive spot where your neck feels like it can support the weight of your tired eyes. You close them in relief, lulled to sleep by the hum of the engine and whir of the vents, the white noise tuning out all the other sounds of your life. For a moment—maybe a few moments, maybe an hour of them, you can’t be sure—you float in that space between sleep and awareness, so tired you are speechlessly grateful that your eyes are closed, and yet somehow still conscious of the fact that you are not at home, cozy in your bed, but in a public space where you may have to open your eyes again at any second.

Eventually a deeper sleep settles in, and you start to dream of running a marathon. You have always wanted to run a marathon. This one is in the mountains, and you are steady and consistent and everyone you love is cheering for you and nothing could be better than this moment, this dream of what you are capable of doing.

But your body and neck, upright in the most unnatural of sleep positions, cannot hold the weight of your sleeping eyes any longer. You start to run off the path of the race, out of the boundaries of safety until…

Your heavy head jerks up from the position it momentarily fell into. You lift your chin and wonder if anyone noticed, if your whole body really jolted the way it felt like it might have, if you can get back to the part of the dream where you were running free and feeling amazing or if you’ll never, ever get to that dream again. It ended in the most unfair and abrupt manner.

Did your dream know you would fall off the mountain in the race you wanted to run your whole life; or did your body, as it lost its sleepy balance of your neck, know first? You’ve always wondered that. It seems your life cannot hold the weight of your dreams. Life is too jarring, too precarious, to balance them all.

And it kind of feels like that.

//

Your toddler son, the sweet little boy with a mind held by a diagnosis you are still trying to wrap your head around, ran away one evening. It was summer, and you were at the lake enjoying dinner with friends. You were sure he was just inside the house watching his beloved Dora show and he was, he was just inside the house. Until he wasn’t.

You thought he went into the lake, and his two-year-old arms and legs did not know how to swim, and you ran down there as fast as your body would carry you but you saw nothing, no ripples in the water, no movement. For a moment your mind let you think he was gone forever and everything went numb and it was all your fault because you should have made sure he was inside watching Dora.

His dad found him two minutes later, down the path in front of a row of lake houses, in the arms of a kind woman who thought surely the little boy in the diaper who couldn’t say his name must have a parent who would be running after him soon.

Your body finally settled down, your breathing returned to normal, but neither of those things happened until the next day.

And when he was three and you couldn’t find him again, the same arresting feeling came back. You ran around the house screaming, working up a sweat of panic, raising your heart rate as if it were the time bomb ticking on your life. But your son was just in his room, behind the bed, looking at a book.

And when he was five and you couldn’t find him, there it was again, the dread that takes the blood out of your limbs. But he was downstairs, in the bathroom, just taking his time.

And still, all these years later, when you call for one of your children and they don’t answer, you wonder if this is the beginning of your worst fear. You are so, so careful. So much more careful than the mom you were before your child ran down the path. You’re the after mom, now. But you cannot seem to teach your brain to remember any feeling from before. When something that scary happens, there is no reaction other than the visceral panic of, “Oh my gosh, please no, it can’t be happening again…”

If someone could just come up with a name for the terror of waiting to find out if the thing you’re worried about is true, for the tingling sensation that starts in your face and runs down your body…

And it kind of feels like that.

//

When you go to the grocery store to grab a few things for dinner, because you saw a recipe for a summer vegetable salad online and it looked absolutely perfect, and the sun is shining bright outside, and you just know that a day like this calls for summer vegetable salad. You’ll be back in an hour.

And when you return, you walk into your own home and something very obvious is not the way you left it, and so you ask the question and you’re told that you are crazy for asking the question and then you start to think, Yeah, that person is probably right, I am crazy. Relax. Don’t borrow worry from your own imagination. Everything is fine.

But hang on, you’ve never been crazy. Sleep-deprived? Yes. Have a mental list that never ends? Yes. Feel like you’re being pulled in a thousand directions? Yes. You have a lot of children. But your mind is still sound. And you cannot shake the feeling that everything is not fine. And that line—between your God-given intuition (real) and paranoid fears (not real)—gets so blurry here your stomach might give out and you cannot even bring yourself to make the salad you bought all the ingredients for, the one you couldn’t wait to try just an hour ago, the one that was going to be perfect. Food is, so suddenly, impossible to think about.

Because something is not right, but you’re told everything is just right, even though your stomach will not believe it. And you have to decide in that moment what, or who, to trust more: your flailing stomach or the human being in front of you. What a terrible, unfair choice.

And it kind of feels like that.

//

Your pastor once told you a story, about how when the United States military dropped those dreadful nuclear bombs in Japan at the end of WWII, the radiation traveled up to 20 miles away from the site of each detonation. And when people, civilians just like you and me, found themselves in the path of that burning poison, many of them, naturally, shielded their eyes with their hands. But no one could have possibly known the destructive power of that bomb, how devastating it would really be. Because when all those people—people who didn’t do anything wrong, they were simply too close to the explosion—shielded their eyes, the radiation burned right through their attempt at protection. Many, many survivors would have the shadow lines of their fingers burned across their retinas forever. They never again saw the world clearly, but through the checkered vision of their injury.

You didn’t live through that same kind of danger, not at all.

But uncovered lies—the big kind, the ones that change everything—they can burn your eyes forever, too. Try as you might (and oh my gosh, you really—probably too much—want people to know you tried), you still see the long, black lines of a lie when you look out at the world and the people in it.

And it kind of feels like that.

///

So I can’t tell you what really happens when you’re lied to—more than once, twice, you don’t even know how many times—only how it feels. Like not noticing how much you’re hurting and changing until you don’t remember what it felt like when it didn’t hurt. Like being shaken awake and for a moment wondering what reality you’re in. Like your body screaming at you “it’s happening again,” making your heart feel like it has both stopped and is pounding at your chest at the same time. Like your stomach feeling hollow. Like your eyes wondering if it’s as dark outside as it seems, or if it’s just your vision in the world now. It feels like all of it. And it’s heavy.

But maybe being able to say what it feels like is really a sign of strength. What if describing it, giving the feeling a scene and a setting and a life of its own, in even the most ambiguous of terms, allows you to put the weight down? Like how you feel when you finish the last set of weights at the gym, or make it inside the house and set the big grocery bags—the ones you were determined to get in one trip—down to the floor, or finally lay the sleeping child in his bed after carrying him up the stairs, and you can exhale.

It kind of feels like that.