Promises and lies

When someone you love hurts you, the feeling compresses your lungs. You can’t really cry, until it has all sunk in. Your breath stops. Your heart beats a dime a dozen and then you get a cascade of arguments in your head. Your mind and heart are in revolution against your self and you are besieged inside and out.

I have struggled all my life against society and its rules. It told me how I should behave as a boy. It told me that I wasn’t really worth anything because I was different from the rest of the boys. It told me that there was a certain way to be to live within it and I wasn’t that way. I struggled against my father, who was a victim of society by himself, because he thought that I should be a certain way too. His love for me was overshadowed by his fear of what he believed in.

My grandmother who was born in 1918 accepted me, but he did not.

I was bought up by strong women. I saw some who had unconventional marriages, some who chose to remain unmarried and were ambitious, some who were conniving and yet had hearts capable of immense love, some who became widows and raised children by themselves and some who had bad husbands and had careers thrust upon them. I learned so many things from them. Mostly, I learned that society doesn’t put food on your table. That one has to do himself and so in the long run, society can go and fuck itself.

So I came out at 16 – to one such woman. I came out to another and another and another and they all accepted me. I felt resurrected because if they had my back no one could touch me. So I learned that honesty was rewarded by those who mattered. That being honest had nothing to do with being accepted but how true you can be to yourself. I admit, I was honest because my honesty was rewarded.

Maybe if I wasn’t rewarded with acceptance, the honest streak I have in me would have been controlled. Would control be a suitable verb to use here?

Over the years, I believed more in love and less in god. I believe more in death than I do in life. I believe that one pays for what one does, either in a good way or bad. I have faced loss, people I love, dogs that are like my children pass by like sand from an open hand. Through it all I have lost more than I have gained. I repeat the same things over and over and I don’t seem to learn despite the fact that the rewards have lessened and punishments have increased.

The things I believed in lie in a broken pile somewhere in a darkened corner of a room I dread visiting. People profess love but they don’t really understand it. Maybe they have it right all along. Maybe the expectations I have need to be torn down completely and I need to rebuild on something that speaks of maturity and reliability of independence within and without.

The men in my life have used my trust and in short, made me wonder on the credit of being honest. I am faced with disillusionment, betrayal at the worst and apathy and uncertainty at the least. All promises have been broken as though they were mere words, air. No hooks of honesty to grapple them to the real world and asking them to materialize into truth.

It has come to the point where I do not even believe that happiness was created only to break the monotony that sadness offers. Everyone wants to have a good time. They indulge you when it suits them and without a moment’s notice, they bare their fangs or they leave you stranded, holding your heart, looking manic.

I always had an idyllic world view. Now I know better. I can trust no one. The only problem that I see with that is that I cannot stop loving.