List of Lie-Adjacent Things: 2017
By Katie Kane
1. I share breath with you softly, repeating your words back, that I am content with this, with things how they are, lying next to you on navy sheets and landmines.
2. Brooklyn in the summer, no air conditioning, Aunt Meg with a stocking over her head, wielding a knife in her hand and I believe for years of my life that my grandmother and her aunt had a good relationship.
3. The word “lie” is an intransitive verb, meaning it does not need a direct object. You cannot lie someone.
4. “There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness, of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.” - Sophia Laing
5. I don’t think you voted for the character on The Apprentice because you wanted change. You were alright with shaving the legs of this country and weren’t aware that problems grow back coarser.
6. My father leaves the i out of my name in emails, texts, conversations. I am now Kate, taking the dimples, white jeweled moccasins, tall chestnut uggs, bruised kneecaps out of my name. I lie to Katie by answering.
7. The moon follows me in the car and the moon follows you and the moon is quite busy keeping up engagements and texting under the table.
8. Silence is less than or equal to violence but greater than or equal to a firm answer get stuck between A and C and your choice may be right but for six months, I will wonder what bubble to fill in.
9. My co-worker lied about having a mug we sell so a customer would buy it. My managers are thirty years old. When I lie about being sick, I wonder if they lie back with their authority, indicating that they will do this with no expiration date in sight.
10. “I love you when I forget about me.”
11. In seventh grade, the boys in my grade played a Nerf Gun war. They would show up at each other’s houses and shoot each other with the guns in order to get someone out. This guy I had a crush on asked me to trick my best guy friend to come to the door. They were best friends. I did it and he got shot. His mom didn’t forgive me.
12. I didn’t think about kissing him at all even while kissing him. I felt his lips graze my shoulder and my shoulders lie to his lips.
13. My acting teacher said no one will know what to cast me in until I’m twenty-eight because my body is a lie to my personality and my personality to my body. I spread like cannot believe butter, that shit, but my brain is dutifully crafted and whipstitched like embroidery. I don’t want to play what my body dictates. 14. I would find lighters in a metal box in my grandparents’ house after my grandfather told me he stopped smoking. I didn’t believe him.
15. I lie better connected to my natural architecture of anxiety and straddling a steady diet of avoidance, avoiding meals with no time and avoiding truth with consequence, truth that comes out in deep moans like Shakespearean verse and drunk stumbles in salmon pink bathrooms.