A 1,000 Lies

On the way home today, I heard a beautiful song by the band " 3 Doors Down", called "Here Without You", that has an amazing line: "A  1,000 lies have made me colder". The song deals with the lingering sorrow and scars of losing someone you love, and the effects of carrying on in spite of the pain. The song, also very beautiful in its melody and soulful rendition, brings to mind many people that have disappeared from my life in bizarre and tragic circumstances right in my immediate family. Both my younger sisters, through illness and untimely death, both my parents also due to tragic illnesses, my only brother due to family feud, many a loved friend, due to time and distance, or simply too complex a circumstance. Yet, I carry on, and like the song explains these lost connections show up in our dreams at night, and we meet those dear to us we lost, and talk to them, travel with them, love them all over again, in situations free of struggle and pain. We laugh with them, cry with them, and they are so real in our dreams, that we often wake up wanting to call them, only to realize with the agony of a reopened wound, that they are dead, gone, too far away, either emotionally or in real time and space. And we carry on, telling everyone we are fine, pretending we are intact, and so, like the song, as time goes on, "A 1,000 lies have made me colder", have made us colder, as we try so very hard to cover up the damage done by the heart aches time and time again. The human condition is a puzzling affair, because we are all on a stage, just like Shakespeare said all those centuries ago, and we carry on, best we can, in our costumed and groomed appearances, to fool very one around us, but never half as much as we manage to deceive ourselves. Of course, what other choice do we have? Those of us who give up all together, because they can no longer stand the pain, and take their own lives, like my youngest sister, are considered with unease, a threat to the uneasy truce the rest of us have made with the realities of our confounding lives.