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Everyone lies. It's not a sad fact, I don't think. Barely even a fact at all. Just...a reality. Something that was always true and will always continue to be true. It's something we all accept, whether we want to admit it or not. We all lie. Every one of us. And it's not just a one-time thing either. It's constant. We do it over and over again. And why wouldn't we? Parents lie to their kids, teach them how to lie right back to them, breeding a new generation of people born into distortion, born into a world of deceit and falsehood disguised as reality. And what can you expect from them? Can you really expect them to turn out pure and innocent when they're constantly being fed their parents' inventions, their teachers' stories? They pick up on those things. I did, at least. Maybe it was just me, though. It's not something you grow out of. As you get older, you keep on lying. You lie about everything, to everyone, at one point or another. You lie about your career when your parents ask how happy you are staying in your dead-end office cubicle counting down the seconds until you can go home and start the cycle of monotony over again. You lie to your spouse promising you'll love them till the end of time, not realizing that sooner or later, that love will run out. And not just for them, for anyone and anything. It never lasts. Nothing does. You lie to strangers when they ask you what you believe, what you pray to, what you curse when things don't work out, spouting some scripted verse you learned as a child and stapled into your head, reciting lines you don't really understand to people you don't really care about, if only to convince yourself that you really do have a clue, that you aren't just flying blind in a sea of the unknown. And then there are the lies that stand out over all the others. The lies we tell ourselves. There's something different about them, something...bitter. Lies you tell to other people, they breeze in, announce themselves and then float right back out. They never linger in your head for longer than it took to talk to the person, discarding themselves as unimportant the second that person leaves your line of sight, never to be seen or thought of again. But the lies we tell ourselves, they don't leave. They don't breeze right back out. They linger, hover before your eyes, tracing over each and every detail until it's burned in your head, until you can recreate it over and over again with perfect precision, not a single word out of place, until that lie has completely overtaken you, washing away anything and everything until it is all that remains. Until it is nothing but the truth. Those lies are the most powerful...the most dangerous. Because unlike the lies we throw at others, the lies we tell ourselves are so much louder, so much brighter, so much more painful. When you can't live with what's in front of you, so you have to create something else, a new reality for you to live in and accept as truth. Because it is the truth. It's the truth you want. And at the end of the day...what else matters? Certainly not the little fib you woke up telling yourself. After all, what harm can come from one little lie? In hindsight, we both should have known it could never be that simple.