Lying, not really

Lying was my alter ego,

and to this day, I can't fathom why.

Why was I a reflexive liar?

Why was my first response to any question

Fiction rather than fact?

At times, it was to please,

many times to hide.

Some lies made people laugh,

others made me larger than life.

Some softened the harshness of truth,

while others were plain excuses.

Did it start as a compulsion,

gravitating to second nature?

Or was it the other way around?

Sadly, i don’t recall feeling guilty

Maybe I grasped the multiverse concept

much earlier in life:-)

where every lie was just another reality,

a parallel universe shaping my version 2.0:

Where i was

more liked, more loved, more accomplished.

Then, I trespassed deeper,

forging signs, mimicking marks.

Yet even then, the weight of it all

never quite shook me.

And honestly, I don’t know what changed the tide.

Was it the slow acceptance of the real me?

Or learning to value respect over being liked?

Maybe adorning black and white

Over the multiple hues of grey

or being surrounded by those

who lived their truth effortlessly.

Most definitely, it was having an offspring,

knowing I owed her my best self.

Years have passed, and my ways have changed

but the realization struck only recently—

when my mother, in passing, called me Harish Chandra.

That was my holy grail.

A stamp of truth, a mark of redemption.

And in that moment, I knew:

I had come to the greener side,

for I had watered it, for years now,

only with truth