You are too dangerous… he wrote. You really like the truth.
Ha. That’s as much as I needed to know.
I thought about my last conversation with Christian. I told him about how a lot of men think of me as dangerous…they say I have dangerous eyes. I know it says more about these people than anything about me. It’s not really my eyes people find dangerous, but what they’re afraid I might see. It’s usually people who have something to hide who are afraid of me. And these are the people that are actually the most dangerous to me.
A few weeks ago, I watched my first DVD of the show, Lie to Me. It’s another crime-solving procedural hour-long drama, this one starring Tim Roth, about a consultant who is very good at reading people and telling if they’re lying. In one episode, this FBI agent really likes this one female specialist who works for Tim Roth. He asks her out and she tells him that she likes him but it wouldn’t work out. When he asks why, she says, because he won’t be able to hide anything from her. She’ll know everything. He looks at her, amused, and tells her he’s up for it. That he has nothing to hide.
That was a really sweet scene. Hell, I wanted to date him when he said that. I would like to meet someone that open and honest. I remember when I told Christian about the eyes thing, his immediate response was that he didn’t think of my eyes as dangerous. He said he wasn’t afraid of my eyes. Maybe this is true, who knows. But it was a noble and sweet gesture, one of those moments that I always remember.
Truth is many things. You take any object, person, event–and you can slice it a million ways and come up with a million perspectives, all of them truthful. Truth is like atoms…it’s the basis of things, but it’s as much a matter of faith and intuition, as it is a hard reality. It’s the simplest thing, and it’s also the least simplest thing. As with everything that’s hard to swallow, step one is acceptance. I’ve gotten to a place in my life where I’ve said fuck it, whatever’s the truth, whatever slice, shade, angle of truth is available at a given moment, I would rather see it than pretend I don’t. I don’t claim to understand it, or claim that truth in any given moment or from any given perspective is the end-all be-all of the big picture, but I would rather see what’s really there than pretend I don’t.
And that has made all the difference in my life.