I step down from the scale and the nurse asks how tall I am.
I tell her I’m five-seven. Well, five-six and a half, but that I’ve decided to start lying about it—men do it all the time.
The nurse smiles as she writes on her sheet of paper, and she says that men lie about other things, too.
Oh yes, I say, I’ve been discovering that.

My life feels surreal.

Everything was turned upside down. But once I stopped shaking, I felt a sense of accomplishment. It was as through I had finally pieced together a puzzle. It took a decade but I finally got the truth about my life. I found out why everything felt so strange and wrong.

I made one big mistake and then doubled down on a million more smaller mistakes, until I was buried so deep I didn’t know how to dig back out. I discovered that once you’ve broken the seal of a horrible mistake, such as moving across the country and marrying the wrong person, all of the other mistakes look small in comparison. I would simply think, fuck it—might as well. Maybe I can fix it that way. Maybe I can turn it around after all. Being broken apart and piecing myself back together so many times left me becoming more glue than any semblance of myself, and my quiet lies have become a disguise.