I don’t know why but, when I write, I always stop just a little ways short of the Truth.
It’s a funny feeling, knowing it’s all somewhere inside me - like there’s something trying to leak out, something gooey that builds up in my chest and that wants to ooze out from my fingertips, leaving me empty. Yet for some reason I don’t let it. I hide the Truth somewhere safe, somewhere deep, and I have no idea how to let it out.
Like, see? I just described the Truth as something gooey that originates in my chest and comes out of my fingers, but that’s not the truth at all! No, the Truth is
more like an airy sort of thing, like a breeze, and it leaves the body like a vapour, constantly, like evaporating sweat.
It comes from the head, the brain - electric shockwaves: fleeting, abstract, unknowable. And it’s like my hands are trying to grasp at it as I write, dashing along the keyboard as the Truth spurs out of me, emanating from my pores. But my fingers aren’t fast enough. The ideas, the vapours pile up on the keys like falling snow on a sidewalk, and my fingers can’t move fast enough - they can only catch as much Truth as their speed will allow. So just by writing this sentence, I am letting go of at least 20 better ones, and that happens with every single sentence, every single word, every single time I write.
But it’s not entirely my fingers’ fault, because I lied again. The Truth is not like a vapour. The Truth does not float around, like air, invisible and light. No, the Truth has weight. The Truth is heavy. I see it clearly sometimes. It’s like a big ball of chaos, bright as day: light against a black backdrop, an amalgamation of ideas with no concepts attached to it, like a thousand words screamed out all at once. And I can see it there, in front of me, inside me.
But I didn’t lie about everything before. One thing I said holds true: the Truth is fleeting. Sneaky as a fox. And I am naïve because, every time, I think I’m going to catch it; every time, I think that I’m finally going to make sense of it all, that I will trap it, that I will make the Truth palpable, concrete. And so I concentrate and start typing, deciphering this huge ball of nothing, of everything, unwinding it carefully, like tangled up Christmas lights, blindly and blinded, until it happens: One wrong pull. One wrong word and it falls apart. It disappears. It vanishes. It unravels, and then the Truth becomes a thousand shattered lights.
Broken.
Useless.
And yet I lied again.