Dad called people of a certain strain bullshitter. I listened carefully, but something was off. Bullshitters were always men over six feet tall with hair and confidence. Dad was five six, wore cowboy boots and a big buckle.
As a boy, looking around, figuring stuff out, I saw keeping up with the neighbors required smoke and mirrors. I felt uneasy about this dupery, like a grey cloud following me around.
Dad only ever had one friend, and he was shorter than Dad. That bothered me, not the height, but the fact that everybody has friends. Mom had friends, I had friends, the neighbor guys had friends. Those guys sat around in lawn chairs in the garage sharing a twelve pack and laughing at their own jokes. Dad never came around. How could they possibly be bullshitters? They weren’t hiding anything from anybody.
White lies became the norm in our household; we became a collection of parrots. Mom kept quiet. Her opinions were cut short, contradicted, eventually Mom stopped speaking up, too tired to push it. It’s a family tragedy because Mom could read the room. Mom had instincts, she had what they call emotional intelligence. Us kids eventually withdrew under the weight of untruths, hiding a closet of falsehoods. We marched on like good soldiers in Dads army, holding on to a self-branding that fronted a hidden person inside. Hell, we were only kids.
This dynamic played out and became a wound, a burden. Even today, sitting around the kitchen table, speaking half-truths out loud, we quietly accept them as full truth. Over time, we gave in like Mom, to uneasy silence. No longer parrots.
Anxiety now seeps into my dreams where a battle is waged and often lost to a murky presence, an undefined form that chases me through the treetops. A subconscious depression? A lingering malaise? Unfinished business? A grown man with uncertainty instead of hope. A melancholic, stuck in a place where the sun doesn’t shine through the canopy, tethered to a pharmacy prescription.
Dad is sitting in his tattered recliner, should I talk? Do I burden a dying bullshitter with a mirror? Hold up his carnival of misdirection when his clock is ticking down? Will it bring me relief from the Jungian shadow? When do I self-actualize? I want to share; I want a clean truth. I’m six foot one.
Rhett Arens is a writer/photographer living in Pasadena who loves travel. He appreciates how it connects strangers and deflates xenophobia. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Travel + Leisure, Taproot, Fifty Grande, Boundary Waters Journal, Whitefish Review, Islands, ROVA and more. His fiction often addresses the negative effects of isolation and resulting self-delusion. He likes to say, travel is a peacemaker.