Lying In Waiting

It came to me tonight.

A truth I didn’t know was missing.

A truth I’m not sure I wanted. One I didn’t need.

It doesn’t matter now. Or, it shouldn’t. But it changed me – my thinking, my feeling, my understanding, my history. It changed my history. You’re not supposed to be able to change that. It happened. It’s done. Over. Unalterable. And, yet, here I am with a different history than I had just 20 minutes ago.

How do we let things from the past alter who we are and how we behave today? I am the same person I was 20 minutes ago. At least, I should be. I’m not. My whole understanding of the last 17 years has changed. In one sentence. One date. One lie.

I am angry over something new – that is actually something old. This is like a Doctor Who episode where I’m time-traveling between a misguided future and an unpleasant past. But, here’s the twist – a modification to the facts of the future have altered the past. Wait – what? That’s not the way it happens! In every time-travel sci-fi chapter it’s changing the past that alters the future. This is all backwards.

It is backwards. And sideways. And disappointing. I wish I’d never read that date. Or, perhaps, I wish I’d read it sooner. When it happened. Would it change where I am today? Conceivably. That’s my problem – where I’m stuck. Had I known this at an earlier time I might be in a very different place right now. That scares me, and angers me, and saddens me. I feel cheated – or, more cheated. I feel manipulated. Again. It is one more lie added to the top of the stack of lies I thought I had finally surmounted. Just one more. But it has blocked my progress. I am stopped.

How ironic that I should find this information today when we turn back the clocks for the end of daylight savings time. Turning back the clock. No! Stop! Too far! You don’t want to go there! Too late. And now I know something I can never un-know. Something that has pierced my heart and leaves me to bleed out through a wound that was finally beginning to heal.

Lies never really go away. Even those once undiscovered will come to the surface at some point. On some rainy night, time will bend and lies that have waited will float to the surface, their camouflage washed away. They will change the past. They will change the future.

It came to me tonight.