Honestly

There are so many quotes about honesty. "Honesty is the best policy" "Honesty is the highest form of intimacy" "Honesty is an expensive gift, don't expect it from cheap people". And the part that bothers Ina is they all make it sound like being honest is a choice. I guess that's what society believes, everyone is born honest and some people choose to lie. That's the "rational" way of thinking about it. Ina was born lying, born into a family of good honest people, raised but raised by liars. Everyone at school seemed normal, people who could count the number of lies they've told on one hand, people who felt guilty for lying. People who took the ability to tell the truth for granted. Ina's mother and father, again, were honest people, they never even made up silly lies about monsters under the bed. But they didn't raise her. She was raised by the local senior home. Ina's parents were busy people so she spent early mornings and afternoons with her grandmothers at the senior home. Grandma and Grammy weren't bad people, but they were accustomed to lying due to the fact that they had to lie about their sexuality and relationship for most of their lives. They didn't necessarily teach little Ina how to lie but they let her know that it was okay to do it. When Grandma died Grammy started lying a lot. Ina would watch her smile and play poker with the other folks at the senior home, hear her laugh and tell them she was fine. But she would also see when Grammy cried alone on Grandma's old bed. Ina saw her sad eyes when she folded Grandma's clothes for the third time that day. And Ina listened when Grammy told her how miserable she truly was. There were many other people and events like this that introduced Ina to the world of lying. She is not aware of the effect they had and still have on her. All she knows is that it was impossible for her to tell the truth. They were little things. "Did you finish your homework?" "Did you say thank you?" "Did you wash your hands first?". Questions that didn't matter. Answers that did. She would lie about the most peculiar things in the most peculiar way. "Did you remember to log out of the computer?" "No, sorry. Can you do it for me?" But...she did remember. And she did log out of it. There was no motivation behind that lie, no reason, no excuse. But she lied anyways, a lie that she clearly knew would not benefit both parties. So why did she do it? A compulsive liar, a pathological liar. Someone who lies without reason for doing so, lying just comes naturally to them. It's a habit. "What did you do over the weekend? Wait, you know what I did? I went surfing and I fell off my board and ONTO ANOTHER PERSON! Like, a total stranger, and then I knocked them off their board and they sort of almost crashed into someone else. It's like a domino effect thing." "Well I went hiking," lie. "and we saw this huge bird and it literally ate another bird, like a smaller one." lie. "My grandpa almost had a heart attack." lie, her only grandpa was dead. Do you see what I mean? Ina created lies like that sometimes, detailed ones in the form of a story. I can tell you with confidence that if she hadn't told that lie it wouldn't have affected her life in any way. It didn't make her seem more interesting, it got a small reaction out of her friend, who later forgot the story. On November 18th, 2018, Ina realized she couldn't tell the truth. There is no part of the definition of a compulsive liar that says you basically have an inability to tell the truth. So maybe Ina was more than a compulsive liar. Maybe it was a disorder? She researched that, but no. Maybe some traumatic event made her scared of telling the truth? Not really. Maybe she shouldn't be trying to find a thing or person to put the blame on and just work on being a more honest person? Yeah, that's what she ended up doing and is still doing. To this day. Ina came up with a plan, of sorts, but not before she killed someone with her lies. Ina ended someone's life by lying on November 16th 2018. She woke up on a normal day. "Did you brush your teeth?" "No." She did. "Go back up and do it." "Ok." She didn't. She had half a piece of toast for breakfast, the bus was 2 minutes late, she got to homeroom on time, just like everybody else. "Did everyone finish their homework?" She hadn't, so she said nothing. She stayed after class to apologize, Mr. Neemer said she could do it tonight for a half grade. Period 4, Math. "What did you get on the test? I got a 94. My mom's gonna kill me." "I got a 95, I don't even know how. I'm not good at math." She actually got an 88. She got curly fries for lunch. She doesn't actually like them, but everyone else does. "Are you free today after school?" "No, I have a class." She didn't. P.E. class. "Do you know if we're running the mile this week?" "Yeah, we are." She had no clue. "Comment ça va?" "ça ne va pas très bien." Elle allait vraiment bien. When she left school there was a storm. It was windy and rainy and scary. The road was slippery. "Ina, honey, do you wanna go to that new store that opened up today? They have this huge opening sale." "Mom, it's raining really hard." "I meant this weekend, silly." Ina did all of her homework. Ate pasta for dinner. Watched Netflix. Went to bed, she forgot to brush her teeth. But no one asked. The next morning someone had died. Margot Kelly went to the same school as Ina. She was going to the new store that opened up but their car slipped and crashed into a large traffic barrier. She died. Her mom didn't, but was severely injured. "Margot and I were heading to the new store to get some shoes on sale, I told her it was dangerous to go out in this weather but she was so pressed and kept going on about a school event and how the shoes she already owned looked 'poor'." Ina recognized the girl by the time science was over, she hadn't known her very well. They showed a presentation at lunch. Everyone had to watch. Ina was sick of all the dead girl talk. It was the only thing her friends would talk about. "Ew wait, the dead girl is the one with the shoes." "Stop, that's mean. She's really nice, and she's really insecure about her shoes. You can't say stuff like that just because someone's, like, poor or something." "Bruh, she's dead." "Did you really just say that?" That's when Ina realized she killed Margot Kelly. Skip ahead a few days, Ina is working on being a better person. It's pretty simple if you think about it, but the simplicity of it is limited to the thinking portion of it. If you stop and prepare what you're going to say before saying it, that would prevent accidental lying. Ina tried to train herself, but didn't quite know how to do that. She listened to podcasts about honesty and morality. She fell asleep listening to them. Even though she didn't actually do much, the amount of lying she was doing decreased A LOT. I don't really exactly know why. My guess is that actually wanting to tell the truth is what helped her be more honest. Because before she didn't really care about telling the truth. But now she does. The trauma of killing someone with her lies also helped probably. I should explain that. Margot was in P.E. washing her face for the third time that day. She constantly felt dirty. She wasn't. She heard someone talking about the mile that they have to run every semester. She asked the nearest person if they were running it this week, "Do you know if we're running the mile this week?" "Yeah, we are." Uh oh. The gym teachers were ok with Margot wearing her knock-off vans for most gym activities. But she had to wear sneakers for the mile, and she couldn't get out of it. So she decided to end the sneaker embarrassment and just get a new pair. Her mom always said no because she thought Margot's sneakers were fine, even if there were holes. "You can barely see the holes, you'll be fine." "If you think it's dirty, clean it yourself." But her mom agreed when she heard there was a sale, she was also just too tired to refuse. But she would absolutely not drive all the way across town in the storm just for a pair of sneakers. But then Margot had an anxiety attack. It scared her mom. "Marg, it's a 25 minute drive. Are you sure this is necessary?" "Yes." The drive to the store was indeed 25 minutes. The drive back home was, unfortunately, cut short. I hope you can figure out what happened from my brief retelling of the events of November 16th, 2018. I made the artistic choice of putting the explanation at the end to add suspense and create that feeling of a "sherlock holmes sensation". Hopefully the reader thinks it was clever and was able to put the pieces together. Before this ends, just like Margot's life, Ina would like to ask everyone a question. "We've all lied at least once in our life before, most of us a lot more than once, does that make us liars?" Few people say yes, as this question is commonly used in arguments to prove that people are not liars no matter how many times they've lied. Maybe it takes a lie ending in a death for one to say yes. Ina no longer eats toast for breakfast and pasta for dinner in the same day.