Glass Houses

I slumped down, my back against the fence, my thoughts moving too fast. Everything had been a lie. The No-to-Nuclear Peace Treaty, the government's promise to protect the citizens at all costs, the things I saw every day on the news. All lies. A glass house of lies, fragile yet beautiful, and in asking too many questions, I had thrown the rock that shattered the whole thing.

"And anyone who survived, even by the smallest chance..."

"They go into the fence," she said, "and they never come back out." She looked at me, and I could feel her sympathy for my shattered world. "I did tell you that you would wish you didn't know, once you found out the truth," she said softly. "And the truth is that we are nothing to them, nothing more than expendable slaves, every single one of us. They control the population with their lies and their false information." She sighed. "The government claimed to be protecting us, but nothing could possibly have been further from the truth." 

In that moment, her eyes looked like they belonged to someone much older than sixteen, and I understood why she had dressed like someone tough, someone no person in their right mind would mess with. It was because if you put on enough of a show, no one would suspect, even for a moment, that you weren't ok. But she most definitely wasn't ok, not in the least. Despite the tough look on her face, I could see how very, very broken she was. It has been said, by some, that the truth is preferable to lies.  But then, when you are forced to look directly at the imperfection of the world, knowing you can do nothing to fix it, you know that even that is a lie.

***********

I blinked out of my thoughts just as the teen looked at the fence with such longing that I suddenly realized why she had been climbing it to begin with. "You were going to see your dad." I said softly. She heard me anyway and she smiled sadly. "Yeah, I'm going to see my dad. It's not as if he'll recognize me, but I haven't seen him in a while and...I've missed him."

I returned her sad smile and looked up at the sky. The moon was almost directly above us, which meant it was nearly midnight. I opened my mouth to tell her good night, to thank her for the truth, but instead what I said was "what now?" I asked the question as calmly as I could, but I needed, from the bottom of my very being, to know the answer. "How do I continue living in this world now that I know the truth? How can I learn to be ok with this?"

She smiled sadly once again. "That's the thing, the reason I was so reluctant to tell you to begin with. It's because now that you know the truth, you'll always, for the rest of your life, wish you could forget, and you never will. It will always be there haunting you, and I wish I could take it back, but by now it's too late. You know the truth, and you will never learn to be ok with it." With those extremely helpful and encouraging final words, she released my wrist, scrambled up the fence, and dropped down on the other side. 

 Then she was running, running, running, until she disappeared into the thick fog. I waited a few seconds, then turned, mind spinning, and walked back to my car, the car I wish I had never gotten out of.