Transitorily Honest

I consider myself to be an honest person. Most of the time. I cheated on a test, once, in college. It was my second term at community college and I was figuring out the ropes of how to juggle the grief of my father's death with the academic rigor of a twelve credit term. I took night classes and kept my mouth closed. I pulled A's for the first time in my life. I don't know what I did during the days besides sleep and ignore the pounding hangovers my insomniac brain demanded.

Is that even honest? Honesty is a mistress of opportunity, she ages well and if not provoked to rage will offer lessons in reality. At that time, I was as honest with myself as I possibly could be. The trappings of truth I invented kept me safe from too much self harm and away from desperation. Now, I look back and with the clarity of time can see a different truth, the truth of the broken spirit that needed spring to come with warmth and flow blood up through my veins and into my heart. The heat of those March days crept into the ice and thawed out my bones, steam rose from my feet as they touched the ground, and that is lucky for if we spend too long frozen our souls will be trapped under ice and may forget to surface. That is what happens with time, the pain, while no less tangible becomes less visceral and safe to look at, to inspect the shards of ice beneath a microscope to learn that ice is teaming with microbial life.

With frozen veins I made way in and out of class rooms. I showed up physically into rooms full of strangers and sat in hard chairs under florescent lights which hummed inside my ears. The sound pulled me out of my body where I would wait for a chink in my thawing veins and reenter my body disoriented and unsure of my surroundings. I fell in and out of my body. Time moved forward without me. I cheated on a test. Time was so slow and my body so light that I hovered above the room looking at answers, marking my sheet correctly. It was terrible to do so well as the professor wrote out our rankings on the board. "And, one of you," he said his voice full of pointed accusation, "Received one hundred percent." That was me, I shrank into my chair. I am not supposed to be seen and now all the eyes in the room shift focus on to me and I am visible as their eyes cast disbelief in my direction.

I had to study so hard after that. To ensure a repeat performance when one cannot rely on out of body experiences to succeed, one must take notes and study notes and spend hours examining them from every angle.

Dishonesty took more work and even if no one knew, I did, and it was wretched. I proved nothing only that I had to overcome more isolation as the space between me and my peers grew ever wider. So I studied and read and sat on the earth warming my legs and felt the breath of summer on my neck and melted into the body of flesh.