A Truth Made of Lies

A Truth Made of Lies: Part Two

My foot crunched the rose pedal on the wet pavement, spreading a crimson paste across the boulevard. I don’t why I had kept the bloody thing in my pocket for the weekend, but seeing it now, so easily eviscerated with the pass of a shoe, it was difficult not to get just a little sentimental. Was that what this all about? Why I had kept that damn rose? Sentimentality? Had I been holding on to something that never existed in the first place? Was I so possessed by the feeling that I had to keep some reminder even after it had been surgically removed from my heart? I stared at the beautiful red cream on the pavement, wishing I could take it in my arms and build a new rose from it. Thankfully Farah managed to get my head out of that one.

            “So, do you want me to address the elephant in the room here, or just let you keep blankly fantasizing about the sidewalk.”

            I shook my head. “I wasn’t fantasizing about the sidewalk, Farah.”

            She laughed. “Why not. It’s a good looking sidewalk. Not too many cracks, right beside some beautiful trees. It doesn’t have a brain so it probably also shares your taste in music. I think you two would get along famously, certainly much better than that Mariah character.”

            My words started creeping past my tongue in a semi-angered, semi-amused fashion. “Why do you always have to work my crushes into our conversations?”

            Farah smiled again, her lips pushing against her hijab. “A girl stands you up and you still have a crush on her? I had hoped you’d progressed since that point.”

            “Well, what can I say, I get caught up in the past sometimes.”

            We reached her house at the end of the boulevard. It was a typical two story Victorian townhouse, trimmed in green and protected by an enormous oak. As cultural attaché for the Iranian Embassy, Farah’s father could have afforded more, but as the parent of seven children, he was pushing the financial limits as it was. Iran might have been a corrupted theocracy, but the money the clerics managed to take from their people rarely found its way back to Ottawa. I had been friends with Farah long enough to hear her say that more than a few times. And we certainly had been friends for a long while. I had been introduced to her with the rest of the class at the Gatineau Academie de Francais nearly five years ago when her family was fresh to Canada. It was odd for a girl who couldn’t speak a word of French to come to a French Academy, but apparently because she had managed to stuff English and Farsi into her brain already, learning the Gallic tongue wasn’t too arduous. I had been assigned to help her pick up the language, and we became fast friends. Since my mother worked as a translator for the Malian ambassador, we had our respective embassies in common. Later on, as we became more comfortable with each other, we discovered that our both our fathers had forced us into a religion which we cared little for and in actuality knew nothing about.

            “I don’t even speak Arabic,” Farah had cried one day during the walk home from school, “and that’s the only language they read the Koran in. You can buy an English translation, but it’s considered a bastardized version. God speaks in a tongue I cannot comprehend. I just utter nonsense and hope I’m singing in the right tune.”

            “Trust me,” I had replied, “it doesn’t matter whether you understand it or not. It never gets any better.”

            Now there was barely a secret which I hadn’t shared with her and although it is impossible to know exactly what another person is thinking, I was pretty sure that the same was true with her as well.

I stopped in front of her yard, and planted my feet in the sidewalk. I couldn’t approach her house, not without being considered an intruder. Farah had already said that the only reason she was allowed to walk home with me was because her mother thought I was a homosexual. Apparently this made it okay for me to spend time with Farah at school, but it was definitely not acceptable for me to go anywhere near her house. I had never heard of any verse in the Koran that said, “thou shalt defend one’s home from potentially gay Italians” but I decided to choose my battles on that one. So, I stayed exactly where I was, waiting for Farah’s reply.