I’m sort of glad that I didn’t write this post earlier. It would have been a bitter and angry post and, rather than that, this morning, driving to work, I suddenly reached a better understanding of it all.

Now, rather than feeling bitter or angry, I feel sorry for them. It doesn’t detract from the fact that I don’t like lies and feel that it isn’t right to lie, especially to me, but I cannot change people and I have to accept it for what it is.

Still, I learnt some things on the way.

The Final Question remains unresolved (but not from my side, you understand) and I now accept, as I said to a mutual friend the other day, that it will always be so. I must now learn not to think about it; to put it out of my mind.

And, anyway, it’s not so much lies. It’s more things left unsaid. Things that should, by rights, be said, aren’t said. They are avoided. My one last (but even as I write it I know there will be one more) act of defiance at these untold truths was a couple of days ago. It was cruel, since I now know the truth and I feel slightly ashamed. But only slightly. After all, even if I had not known the untold truth, it would have been done that way. It only remains ‘cruel’ because of what I now know.

And the untold truth leads to other untold truths and the whole thing becomes an untold truth. And it’s no longer that they are untold truths, in themselves, but rather that the untold truths mean that the whole thing is put into doubt and no truths can be told because to tell some truth may unravel the neat untold truths and it would then be seen for what it is – a life of lies.

“I can’t stand all the fabulousness”, I was told. It was meant that, it’s difficult to stomach all the fabulousness about everything when you know, because you’ve been told, because you know, that underneath all that fabulousness is ‘not-fabulousness’.

But, for me, it’s not even that. What these untold truths mean is that you can no longer talk to someone who, at one time, you were happy to call a friend, about your concerns and worries; you can no longer ask for help; and when something good really happens, you can no longer tell that either because to tell that would imply that, after all, it hasn’t been that fabulous after all; and that would mean to imply that, perhaps, you had not been previously telling all the truth.

And so, you say nothing. You cannot say anything. The communication can start but cannot continue. And so I send an email. And I get a reply. And then I send the reply with the cruel question – for now, I know the reality. And that’s where the communication stops. Or else, as some text messages in August prove, the question or query or statement that you send is completely ignored as if it was never written – because, of course, there is no answer that can be given that is either logical, fair or true – and if you know that much, how can you respond?

And I started out being angry and then became bitter and then I realised that, actually, it was not me that was suffering as a result of this but rather them. And, at that point I actually felt rather sorry for them and thought that, for me, even if I could lie (or not tell the truth) which, in any case, I don’t do well, I would not be able to stand the fact that I could not talk to my friends about the things that were hurting or the problems I was facing and nor could I celebrate when I was triumphant and, in any of those circumstances, I would be missing something and would feel more lonely as a result.

>And, so, in the end I felt so sorry for them for the untold truths make for a lonely world.