Insincerity

Some of us, insincerity runs through like bad blood, its ink sinking into our veins, indelible scripts that cover our skin from below, marks invisible to most but screaming out at us that this is what we are. Insincerity, for some of us, is not a choice, it is not a cluster of words spat out to confuse, diffuse, or to protect ourselves, it is a sense of who we are no matter the accuracy of what we say. Insincerity, for us that are this way, is the standart by which we judge our words, our actions, it is the inevitable backdrop of the selves we display to the outside world, it is in our bruises and our laughter, in our opinions, kisses, and passions. Some of us cannot let go of the fear, the inadequacy we brand ourselves with, we deal with it by dealing false cards, not to others but to ourselves, we pick up the fool and laugh sadly and say "this is who I am there is no escaping it", then we hold the liar to our faces and shake our head with a furrow between the brows, because, though his nose, cheeks, and eyes are nothing like ours, the mouth of the fool looks identical to ours in the way it moves, and we accept this because no-one could scrape this conviction from our mind, no-one could, because we take their compliments and criticisms of who we taught them that we are and we say "but how should they know any better, I have lied to them since we first spoke". Our friendships put up with us out of ignorance, because we have fooled them like masters, like magicians on a stage, we have stuck our fists between their open jaws, pulled out a flapping dove and said "look here, how free you are, how free to choose my friendship, how free to choose to give me love". We stick the same hand into our mouth and pull out a dripping string of lies, tissues of them, knotted together interminably, and we observe what we are convinced is not ourselves. These are not our words, they couldn't be, they are not inside me anymore, they must be wrong, corrupted, they must be false. We hold our drenched string of lies and drag it behind us through the dust while others hold our shoulders and laugh and say "I like you just the way you are".