Liar, Liar
The truths I'm not prepared to tell anyone.
Hello Wonderful Readers,
Yesterday, a poet asked me,
“Do you ever tell lies?”
He had locks of brown hair, a strong jawline, and wicked eyes that smiled. I caught his gaze for a second, but then I quickly looked away. I focused on his somewhat dorky, checkered shirt. My shoulders hung heavy with guilt as I listened to the catchy notes of Lou Reed that played over us from an old vinyl turntable.
I was three hours into my first date with this poet at Hule, a trendy, bustling bar in Mexico City. The night air was scented with a thin layer of cigarette smoke and air pollution. We had gotten along rather well, laughing a lot, until that moment. Could he sense that I was hiding something?
“I h-had to lie the other day,” I admitted, stumbling over my words, “But I believe lying is really bad. And I never do it.” I took a large sip of my IPA. I let the sharpness of the alcohol zap my throat.
“Why did you lie?” he pressed me. It was the next most obvious question. Urgh, I was terrible at this, I thought to myself.
“Well,” I started, and then I immediately regretted everything as it came out of my mouth, “I had to go to the doctor to get…um…my IUD replaced. I didn’t meet the requirements, but I only had one day to get it done in England for free. So, I had to go to this clinic and give them a fake name and a fake address. Anyway, I got it done.”
I bit my tongue. Didn’t meet the requirements? Oh, please.
The truth was that I had scheduled that appointment in London two months in advance, and when I finally went to the doctor, she had asked me, “Have you had any unprotected sex in the last three weeks?”
And I answered honestly, “Yes,” because I’m a clueless fool. And then she stared deep into my soul and said, with pity in her voice, “You should probably take some emergency contraception because you could be pregnant.” This was a ridiculous thing for her to say because I still had my old IUD inside of me, and I apparently study and care about women’s health, and I thought I knew about these things. And that even if my IUD had expired a month ago, it wouldn’t just stop working overnight. But I couldn’t be sure without reading all the medical fine print from the IUD companies on the internet and deciphering a bunch of Reddit forums that night. And now, after eight years of not having to worry about pregnancy, this nurse was dishing out to me all the shame that I’d thought I was smart enough and wise enough to avoid and made me feel like I was being totally reckless for having what had been a beautiful, deep connection with a very sexy man.
The truth was that I then had to tell Todor*, this very sexy man that I was sleeping with and whose dangerous sperm was potentially still swimming inside of me, that I might be pregnant after I had let him cum inside of me as many times as he wanted to because that was what I had wanted also. Needless to say, discussing my potential pregnancy with him was kind of a vibe killer because he said to me, “I don’t want to have a kid.” I didn’t have the guts to tell him, “I want to have a kid, but maybe not today, but maybe if we were actually boyfriend and girlfriend, I would have wanted to have one with you, but we live in different countries on different continents, and I am honestly so depressed being here in London, and I would never come back here, at least never again during the winter, if I could avoid it, but I’m too scared to tell you that.” And that after fulfilling my weird impregnation fantasies, while I had quite enjoyed my times with him, actually facing the reality of potentially conceiving a child together didn’t feel quite as cool or fun or sexy as those times had been.
The truth was that I had then had to leave that clinic without my new IUD and wait for another couple of days for all of Todor’s dangerous sperm floating around in my inner caves to die before I rushed myself to another clinic on my last day in London. There, I gave the doctor, who was really quite a kind woman who did not deserve to be lied to, a fake date of birth and a fake address, which was definitely super illegal. And then I lied to her that I hadn’t had unprotected sex in the last three weeks so that I could do what was right for my own body because I really did need that Hormonal IUD to help with my periods and also give me a solid form of birth control for the next eight years. I was privileged enough to live in a country that offers socialized medicine, but that has a lagging enough technological system that didn't check between clinics, and I could take full advantage of it for my own benefit.
The truth was that once she had finally inserted my new IUD, which was physically painful but that didn’t scratch the surface of this evident emotional turmoil, she suggested to me that I probably would want to take it out before the eight years were up, meaning that she expected me to want to have a child by the time I was 37, all that being contingent on finding a partner and us wanting to start a family together, which would not be an easy decision, and that person was tragically but undeniably not going to be Todor. I was turning 30, and I wasn’t a teenage girl anymore. The eggs in my ovaries were not going to live forever.
The truth was that this made me feel very sad. Remembering all of that, I really had no business being on a first date with this funny and charming Poet Man anyway because it had barely been a week since I had left Todor behind in London, the city I grew up in and used to call home but frankly hated visiting, wondering all the while why modern love had to be so fucking hard but also knowing that I would never be happy living in London again. I had gone through so much in the last three years to build a beautiful life for myself in Mexico, and I wasn’t about to throw all that away for nothing.
The truth was that I had spent most of that week before the date randomly sobbing whenever I got a brief moment to myself, especially whenever I sat down to play “Mad Rush” by Philip Glass on the piano in Soho House, where Todor and I had celebrated his birthday and my first author birthday together a mere month ago. And I had finally felt loved by someone else for a brief moment in time after years of dating assholes or perfectly lovely men with whom I had no future, and now the one person that I had quite liked and I believed had quite liked me back couldn’t be together, and that made me so, so sad. And that in my first week back in Mexico City, I had intentionally returned with my other friends to the places where I had memories with Todor so that I could paint over every scent of him that kept creeping up in my body, whether that be at my favorite pizza place or a random spot on the street near my house. And I had initiated 60 days of no contact with him also, or until further notice, so I could rip out the roots of whatever love for him I had that was growing inside of me and lob that tree off at the lowest point of the trunk possible.
The truth was that I still had the card that Todor had given me. I had stashed it with the book that he had bought for me in the closet in my house because I didn’t want to get rid of them yet. Still, I also didn’t want to come home and see them and think about them and think about him every day, and I knew that he would understand that. However, the fact that I knew they were still in my closet and that I am thinking about them even now made it even more clear to me that I still wasn’t over him. I might have to get rid of his gifts if I ever wanted to be, but we had ended on good terms, so there was really no reason to be quite so drastic in my actions to remove him from my life anyway.
The truth was that, as funny as this Poet Man was, he was never going to know any of this, and as I had no intention of going home with him, I would keep it that way. Because, practically speaking, while many of us dating in our late twenties and early thirties are not virgins, the last thing you want someone to bring up on a first date is a past lover. It’s rude. It’s disrespectful, and frankly, I was not about to give this Poet Man the barefaced dissatisfaction of knowing that I was not over Todor at all. Instead, I let him speak.
“I mean, it makes sense if you got done what you needed to get done,” he said vaguely, but in a way that I knew he was trying to be kind.
“I guess,” I said, “What about you? When was the last time you lied?”
The Poet Man continued with the conversation. I let his words drift in through one of my ears and out the other.
Do you want to know the full truth? Next week on Misseducated, I’ll be back with the honest story of how Todor and I met and what we got up to when he was in Mexico. Wink wink.
Until then, I hope you have a lovely weekend.
Much love,
Tash
💌 ✍️
*Todor, as I will name him, agreed to be anonymized in this newsletter. He originally wanted me to call him “Danny.” Well, I think Todor is a much sexier name than Danny, and it's more fitting as far as I’m concerned, given that Todor was, indeed, a very sexy man.