Desire

Every story has a teller. Every tale is a story of desire. Every teller tells a tale of desire.

The human condition is inalienably one of desire - unfulfilled desire, desire that never and is always already insatiable. We make the best laid plans (of mice and men) but they fail to meet desire. We desire warmth, friendship, companionship, understanding - and love. But the desire is rarely fulfilled. We desire happiness because we know it remains an ideal for if life were about happiness there would have been no desire to seek it like a man who seeks immortality.

The desires we have are vaulted in impossibilities. The human condition is a quest to unlock the unfulfilled desires. But it remains a condition wrought with disappointment. For we desire that which even the Gods would fear.

So we weave webs of lies about our accomplishments, our false successes, our conquests, exploits. All in the attempt to believe we can satiate desire. We preach half-truths and untruths. We narrate furiously fictions about our lives, our past, our history, our person. For we know that the reality of who we are is so wrought with disappointment and shame, a shame we face daily in the deafening silence of the night. This shame, fuelled by the inadequacies of who we are and the insecurities of being unloved and forgotten, spurns our desire to concoct alternate histories. And so there are lies. And so there are fabrications, exaggerations. And so we make attempts to paint over the shame of our history and our self-despised condition. We lie to seek empathy and love. We brag to find admiration for the nothingness we recognise we are. We exaggerate to find acceptance. We manipulate words to devise a new self for their pernicious power can create a new history we desire others to read... and desire. We re-invent ourselves conscious or otherwise, a self based on stratas of falsehood, deceit, illusion. With time, we believe the illusion to be reality; we fall prey to the fiction we have by our very hands created.

And life becomes nothing more than a lie ... to hide from the very shame that is who we are.

But how do we find love and acceptance, in any form, when the life we have chosen to create is nothing more than a lie?

Illusions can be broken. We find new parties to deceive in the hopes they would become friends to exorcise the pervasive loneliness that haunts. All little helps even if they were mere distractions to keep us away from the pain of being alone. Friends need not be real... they merely need to be functional.

But when the spells of fiction are broken by the illumination of self-knowledge, when we confront ourselves in the quiet of the night, in the darkness of our conscience, we look around only to find no one there for those that have truly loved us have departed in dismay and despondence; those that remain love only the lie we have inscribed now in stone. And there is no one...

What I'd like to know is not if your life is a lie but how much of it you believe is not... Or do you no longer know...?