To lie is to know

Elias hadn’t planned to spend his lunch break in a dusty used bookstore, but the rain had come down hard and fast, trapping him inside. He wandered the aisles, brushing his fingers over cracked spines, the musty smell of old paper pressing against him like a heavy coat.

That was when he saw it: The Paradoxes of Identity.

The title tugged at something deep and unsettled, a chord he didn’t know had been strung. Lately, he’d been feeling unmoored. His job, his relationships, his place in the world, none of it felt as solid as it once had. Maybe it never had been.

Elias had always been a thinker, even as a child. Teachers praised his curiosity but warned his parents about his tendency to fixate. A simple riddle could leave him awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, caught in loops of “what if?” and “why not?” His parents, kind but practical, dismissed it as a phase. “You think too much, Elias,” his mother often said with a gentle smile. “Sometimes you just have to let things be.”

But Elias never learned to let things be.

He bought the book and spent the rest of the day ignoring emails at his desk, reading instead. One line stood out, bold and unrelenting:

If every plank of a ship is replaced, piece by piece, until no original parts remain, is it still the same ship? And if those old pieces are rebuilt into another ship, which one is the real Ship of Theseus?

The question gnawed at him. That night, as he stood in the bathroom brushing his teeth, he stared at himself in the mirror. His face had changed over the years, softened and weathered in ways he hadn’t fully noticed until now. Every cell in his body had been replaced countless times.

Am I the same Elias I was twenty years ago?

And if I’m not... who is?

The obsession grew quickly. His notebook filled with diagrams of two ships, one built from the original planks and one from the replacements.

He imagined the process in excruciating detail. Each plank removed from the ship was set aside carefully, stored in some imaginary warehouse, each marked with the label: original. And when the last plank had been replaced, someone quietly began reconstructing it from the old pieces, every nail and beam precisely as they had been before.

Elias couldn’t let it go. “If the old ship exists again,” he muttered to himself one night, pacing his apartment, “then it hasn’t been destroyed. But if it’s still the same, what does that make the other?”

The world around him began to feel tenuous, as if it, too, could be divided into two realities: the one he knew and the one he’d lost.

At first, the changes were subtle. Elias didn’t notice them right away; they were small, almost imperceptible. His old leather wallet, fraying at the edges, looked new one day—too new. The familiar creases, the soft worn-in corners that had defined it for years, were gone, replaced by a surface so smooth it felt foreign under his fingertips. When he mentioned it to a friend, they waved him off. “You probably just haven’t noticed it before.”

But Elias had noticed. He knew his wallet, every scuff and scratch, every mark that told a story. This wasn’t it. His suspicion grew, creeping like a cold fog. He began to wonder if other things in his life were being replaced. His worn desk chair, his favourite coffee mug—each one felt subtly off. The coffee mug he cherished, with the chipped handle, suddenly gleamed as if it had never been used. The texture of the wooden floor in his apartment became more uniform, more polished, smoother than the rough-hewn planks that had creaked under his feet for years. Each time, the old versions lingered in his mind, like memories of things once real, now replaced by facsimiles, waiting to be rebuilt.

One night, Elias woke in a cold sweat. The dream had been vivid—too vivid. He was standing on a pier, staring at two ships. One gleamed with polished wood and crisp sails, its deck pristine. The other was weathered, scarred, familiar, every crack and worn patch of wood exactly as he remembered. He had reached out to touch it, but when his hand made contact, it felt wrong. The texture wasn’t what he expected, smooth where there should have been imperfections. What was it? He couldn’t place it. He bolted upright in bed, heart pounding, the feeling of the dream lingering.

The cracks in reality widened. His reflection in the bathroom mirror grew stranger. One evening, Elias swore it smiled at him when his own face remained still. And then there was the voice—quiet at first, like the whisper of creaking wood, but growing louder with every passing day:

Which one is the real ship?

He tried to shut it out, to bury himself in work, but his colleagues began to notice his distraction. “Elias,” his manager said during a meeting, “you’ve been off lately. Is everything okay?”

Elias stared at the man’s face, at the worry in his eyes, and for a moment, he wondered: Have you been replaced too?

Weeks passed and Elias’s notebook was almost full now, its pages warped by the pressure of his scribbling. Every question, every diagram, every desperate attempt to pin reality down had failed to yield answers. His flat had become a shrine to his obsession: books stacked in precarious towers, loose papers scattered across the floor, diagrams pinned to the walls with frantic annotations.

One evening, while poring over a philosophy text, he stumbled upon a new paradox.

The Raven Paradox.

It was deceptively simple. The statement “all ravens are black” was logically equivalent to “all non-black things are not ravens.” Observing a black raven confirmed the rule, but so did observing a green apple—because a green apple, not being black, also wasn’t a raven.

Elias stared at the page, his mind reeling. If a green apple could somehow prove something about ravens, then what was proof worth? What was truth?

It consumed him. He started collecting objects, placing them in rows across his sitting room floor. A black coat next to a white mug, a red notebook beside a green bottle. He muttered to himself as he worked, his words half-formed: “This confirms that. But then... this confirms...”

Sleep became impossible. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw ravens. Some black, others in impossible colours—blue, green, shimmering gold. They perched on the edges of his dreams, watching him with eyes that burned like embers.

When he awoke, the whispers had grown louder. They mocked him, echoed his own thoughts back at him. How can you prove anything? How can you know?

Reality itself began to splinter. One morning, Elias stepped into his kitchen and paused, his heart pounding. The knife on the counter was gone, replaced by a fork. He didn’t own a fork like that.

The next day, it was back to being a knife, but he wasn’t convinced it was the same one.

When he walked through the park, the green apples in the trees seemed to follow him with their gaze. A raven cawed in the distance, and he spun around, searching for it, desperate to see its black feathers.

Elias tried to explain the paradox to the few people still in his life. “It’s not just about the ravens,” he insisted to an old friend who’d reluctantly agreed to meet him for coffee. “It’s about everything. Everything confirms everything else, but it also means nothing. Don’t you see?”

His friend looked at him with pity and confusion. “Elias, you need help. You’ve lost perspective.”

Perspective. The word rattled in his skull. What was perspective but another illusion? He stumbled home, laughing bitterly.

The ravens returned that night. He stood in his flat, staring at the black coat on the floor, imagining it sprouting wings. He clutched at his notebooks, desperate for something solid, something that made sense.

But nothing did. Not anymore.

Elias’s flat had become a labyrinth. Books and papers formed precarious towers, each one leaning dangerously, as though the weight of his thoughts might collapse the walls of reality around him. His obsession with paradoxes had reached a fever pitch and every surface was covered in scribbled equations, diagrams, and quotes from ancient philosophers, all attempting to piece together some semblance of truth. But there was no answer. There never had been.

The Raven Paradox still plagued him, its implications gnawing at the edges of his sanity. But Elias couldn’t think straight—not with the room closing in on him. He shoved himself up from his desk, pacing the length of his flat as if movement could shake the questions free.

Outside, the rain had finally stopped, leaving the city bathed in an eerie, muted glow. Elias pressed his forehead against the windowpane, watching drops streak down the glass. For a moment, he let his mind quiet, focusing only on the rhythm of his breath and the cool touch of the glass.

But the questions always came back, louder than before.

He turned back to his desk, grabbed his notebook, and began scribbling furiously:

• If green apples can tell me about ravens, what else can?
• Does a red chair confirm the rule? A blue car?
• If everything confirms everything, how do I know what’s real?

The ink smudged under his hand, the page turning chaotic with scrawled thoughts. The more he wrote, the less clarity he found.

It was in this madness that he stumbled upon yet another paradox—the Liar’s Paradox.

“This statement is false,” he read aloud. The words hung in the air like a weight, pressing down on his chest. If the statement was true, then it was false. But if it was false, then it must be true. Elias felt his mind twist with the impossibility of it.

It was a simple sentence, but it shattered everything. If a single sentence could contain such contradiction, what else could? What if everything we knew, every fact, every piece of knowledge… was simply a lie wrapped in truth?

He grabbed his notebook, scribbling furiously:

• If I say I don’t know the truth, is that a lie? Or is it the truth?
• What if everything I believe is false? What if truth is simply a construct, an illusion we cling to to make sense of the world?
• What if nothing is real, except the lie that we tell ourselves?

Elias stood up and began pacing, his mind racing. What is truth?

His questions were no longer just theoretical. They were a slow, twisting cancer growing inside him, pulling apart every belief he’d ever held. Truth was no longer just something to be found; it was something to be feared.

He opened the window and gazed out at the city below, but it felt distant, unreal. The buildings seemed to warp in the distance, their edges bending like reflections in broken glass. Nothing made sense. Was this even real? Or was this just another lie his mind had created to cope with the chaos inside?

Weeks passed in a blur. Elias became a mere shell of the person he had once been. He found himself speaking aloud to the empty room, presenting contradictions to the still air:

• If I am right, I must be wrong. If I am wrong, I must be right.
• This sentence is both true and false, and neither true nor false. It is everything and nothing at once.

He began to lose track of time. He didn’t know whether it was morning or evening. The boundaries between waking and dreaming blurred. He started questioning the very concept of time itself. If time is the measure of change, then what happens when nothing changes? When everything is constant, where does time go?

The paradoxes were relentless, each one feeding off the others. The Liar’s Paradox twisted itself into an Ouroboros, consuming its own tail. And then the Ship of Theseus circled back, each fragment of thought disintegrating into another, like broken pieces of a puzzle that could never be solved.

One day, he found himself sitting in front of a mirror, his face drawn and pale, his eyes bloodshot from sleepless nights. He stared at his reflection and then at the empty room behind him. The mirror showed a version of him, but was it him? If he was looking at himself, did that make him real? Or was the reflection just another layer of illusion? Another lie?

Elias laughed bitterly. The questions had become insurmountable. And yet, he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t escape. His mind was a storm of paradoxes, but the more he searched for an answer, the more elusive the truth became.

Was there ever an answer? Or was the search itself the illusion?

He began to think of all the philosophers, those ancient thinkers who had asked similar questions. Was it possible to know anything? Could certainty ever exist? Or was all of it simply a game of words to distract us from the ultimate truth, that we know nothing at all?

Nothing made sense. Everything was a lie. And yet, there was something more terrifying than the lie itself, the realisation that perhaps the lie was all there ever was.

Elias’s descent reached its crescendo one bleak, rain-soaked evening. His flat had transformed into a museum of paradoxes, each relic carefully arranged yet entirely chaotic. A perfect companion to his crumbling mind. Objects lay dismantled, paired and grouped according to their existential weight: a knife and a fork juxtaposed with the phrase which one cuts deeper? a shattered mirror with the inscription what is truly broken? scrawled beneath it.

He hadn’t eaten in days. The concept of hunger itself felt like another lie, a fleeting signal in a world of uncertainties. Every moment felt detached, unreal, as if existence itself were playing a cruel trick on him.

Elias sat at his desk, his notebook spread before him. The final pages were filled with ramblings, fragments of questions that had long since abandoned coherence. His hand shook as he scribbled once more:

• If I am not who I was yesterday, am I still me?
• If I think, do I exist? Or is thought itself the illusion?
• If the truth is a lie, and the lie is the truth, then what is there left to believe? If everything crumbles into nothing, and we are left to question if anything ever mattered… then what was the point of it all?

That night, Elias left his flat for the first time in weeks. The city was eerily quiet, its streets glistening with rain under the dim glow of the streetlights. He wandered aimlessly, his mind a torrent of contradictions.

Eventually, he found himself standing at the edge of a bridge, staring down at the dark, swirling water below. The river seemed alive, a churning mass of uncertainty that mirrored the chaos within him.

“This is it,” he murmured to himself. “The final question.”

He leaned over the railing, his voice trembling as he spoke to the void. “If I jump, am I still Elias? Or does the river make me something else? Does the act of falling change me, or is it the landing that decides?”

The wind howled around him, carrying his words into the night. His mind looped back to the Liar’s Paradox, the phrase that had undone him. This statement is false. He repeated it aloud, over and over, his voice cracking under the weight of its simplicity.

“If the statement is false, then it’s true. If it’s true, then it’s false. What am I—true or false? Do I even exist?”

And then…

Silence.

The next morning, I found his notebook on the railing of the bridge. I don’t know why I stopped. I wasn’t looking for anything. Maybe it was the way the rain had pooled around the pages, as though the notebook itself had been weeping. The ink had bled in places, but one line stood out, stark and jagged against the damp paper:

To know is to lie. To lie is to know.

I should have left it there. I should have walked away. But instead, I picked it up.

At first, it was simple curiosity. Who was Elias? What had led him here, to this bridge, on that stormy night? The words he left behind were maddening—snippets of questions that seemed to spiral in on themselves.

But then, something shifted. The more I read, the more his words lodged themselves in my mind. I started seeing paradoxes everywhere, in the way shadows move when no one is watching, in the way a question can linger long after the answer is given.

Last night, I dreamt of him. Or maybe it wasn’t a dream. I saw him standing at the edge of the bridge, staring down at the water. He turned to me and smiled.. A strange, knowing smile. He said nothing, but I understood.

Now, I can’t stop thinking about that line: To know is to lie. To lie is to know.

It’s in the rhythm of my breathing. It’s in the ticking of the clock. It’s in the way I wonder, even now, whether Elias truly jumped—or if the act of not knowing is the answer itself.

I don’t go near the bridge anymore. But sometimes, late at night, I hear the river calling.

And I wonder: if I were to step to the edge, would I find the truth? Or would I only lose myself to the same question that consumed him?

I’m writing this now, but even as I do, I’m questioning if these words are mine… or his.

Perhaps there is no difference.

Perhaps there never was.

Perhaps I’m not writing this at all.