True Sight

There comes a moment in everything, I guess, where you see it and see it clearly for the first time.  It doesn't matter what it is that obscured your vision for so long.  Maybe it was some kind of love.  Maybe it was something like hope.  Maybe it was sheer deliberate stubbornness in your own rightness.  Eventually all the scales fall away and what you're left with is no blurred glory, but only the pure truth.

And you'd think that truth would be lovely to look upon.  You'd think that it would be somehow holy, glowing and white, since it is that thing we chase, that thing we long for.  How seldom that is actually the case...

See, actually, the deceptions we weave for ourselves are the beautiful things.  We wrap something stark and horrible, something relentless and uncaring, in layers of warmth and color.  It's the old defense of the oyster against sand.  We create iridescent beauty to hide the things that have the power to break us. Therefore, the moment when the veils are drawn aside and all the illusions are destroyed, that moment that should be liberating, becomes instead a moment of almost intolerable cruelty, of Truth echoing Hamlet's "I must be cruel only to be kind."

Now that it's all a tumbledown mess and I cannot look at it anymore, even though what I'm seeing is only what was really there all along, the true test of me, I suppose, is going to be what I do next. Do I start covering over the real, naked, broken ugliness of it again, patch the holes, put it back up on its pedestal, pretend it is not broken?  Or do I have the strength to walk away from what has never been and will never be whole?