My aunt brought a summer floral dress back from her shopping spree and made me try it on in front of all the other relatives. They threw back their heads and laughed at the over-sized cloth that fell like a curtain at my feet. I said I hated dresses and I would never put them on when I got older. But when I was left alone at home, I would stand in front of the mirror and walk around the house in that dress pretending I was big enough to wear it. That was the first time I lied.
In an afternoon, I sat with my mother in front of the television and she asked me to do her a favor. She sat on the floor in front of me as I crossed my legs on the couch. She handed me a pair of tongs and signaled me to pick the strands of silver hair on her scalp. For each time I stole the aging years from her head, I would complain about how I'd never do such tedious work for her the next time. But every time she sat before the couch with the pair of tongs and a rounded mirror, I'd take them from her wrinkling hands and search for the white wires in a sparse forest of blackness. I would tell her that I hated doing this. That was the first time I lied.
The sunflowers in the balcony was a gift from my sister's boyfriend. He bought her the seeds from Amsterdam and told her to plant them. They didn't bloom until the sun had gone down for over 30 times. Every morning, my sister would check for flower buds like mail and sprinkle nutrient water to its soil. Its stem refused to stop growing and yet the bud was still too reluctant to let the sun kiss it. When it finally blossomed, its body was too tall to support the petals that it kept lying prone and weeping over the rim of the vase. No matter how my sister tried to secure it and give it a backbone, it never seemed to stand still. She expressed her frustration as the plant symbolized sentimental significance to her. The flower could almost be identified as hideous, but I told her I thought it looked lovely that way. That was the first time I lied.
The first boy that I ever loved found home in England. Maybe the city blocks in Hong Kong resembled too much of those rotten teeth in his nightmares and maybe he never really found home in me the way I lived in him. His first flight back was always the longest and I imagined myself travelling miles to a foreign place with buildings that rendered themselves indifferent to the passengers that never belonged. But I used to think that you could find home anywhere if you loved its people enough. And so that was where I came in. When he said it was over and told me to leave everything behind, I agreed meekly. But I was too young to teach myself what it really meant - Should I still call? Does it mean it's gone forever? Do I get to visit? Letting go is such a big commitment. So after that I kept showing up time after time, vowing that it would be the last one. I said I needed to learn slowly, step by step. And I said I'd eventually master the art of letting go. That was the first time I lied.
When I was younger, I used to take an erasable marker and drew on the windowpanes in my bedroom. I drafted stories on these glasses and if the sky wanted to see what I saw, it had to learn to read backwards. As I'm growing older, my writings vary. I act as if it was my first creative writing class in university that's changed the style of my articles when in fact it was what I've been through that's shaping it, molding it into lapidary forms and structures that yearn to be understood. Now the windowpanes are always empty but my heart is always full. In almost every creative writing class, there was an activity where students wrote the beginning of a poem and passed the paper around for the next student to proceed with it. The pieces of paper would be circulated until the poems were lengthy enough to be finished. Gio was sitting on my right and he handed me his first sentence, "If love was a gun," Gio was a quick thinker. He was always the first one to complete the in-class writing tasks. I struggled to carry on with the words he wrote, but I managed to scribble out a short ending to what he was seemingly trying to challenge me with: "the one in front of it lives forever." The lecturer, Chris, walked around the classroom checking on our progress and he came up to me and asked, "Do you enjoy starting the poem, continuing with it, or ending it the most?" It was apparently just a stupid question that he posed to act like he was trying to get to know his students better. I said I liked spending my time in transit. But I didn't. I either pull the trigger or I don't. So that was the first time I lied.
If the idea of love distracts us from an existential loneliness, what does love itself do to its host? I swore to myself that I'd never write about another boy I'd fallen in love with ever again but then here I am, fighting with the overpowering notions inside this suffering dome that's sticking out of my neck. Under my skin there's a panicking urge to take over and burst out the pain of that needle being stuck in my veins in my early childhood. The last night I spent with him before he left for the airport, he tapped his fingers on my kneecap and I wished I was a better conversationalist. But I was tired and I'd been tired for quite a while. There were feelings that needed too much effort and courage to verbalize and storms that weren't meant for humans to weather. I've always known how it feels to lose the one thing that hurts the most to keep around. And so when he was about to take off, he asked me, on the phone, if I'd cried. I shook my head and mumbled a small "No", my chin against the skin that's still warm and sticky from the hot tears pressed into the back of my hands. If the result of the matter wouldn't differ whether or not I told the lie, it shouldn't be considered a lie after all, should it? Love is a gun and I am not the one in front of it. If this isn't meant to be, I still need my heart to be broken more times. And when he asked me if I missed him, I said no. I still have so much to conquer. And this is the first time I lied.
