It only took one bad lie. How much have I actually been lied to? How much of my life has, consequently, become a lie?

How does it become my fault?

If you let go of a crystal glass (on Earth, in the presence of gravity) from chest height, it will fall to the ground, and, most likely, break. But you let go. You made it break. So how can you be angry when it breaks? How can you blame the glass. You let it go.

Or what if you get lucky? What if it doesn’t break? What if it falls onto a soft carpet? What if someone slides across the floor to intercept it from its fate? What if they save the glass?

But what if one day you try it again? You drop the glass. Nothing to break its fall. Nobody to save it. It breaks.

Can you blame it for spreading shards across the floor? Whose fault was it? Not the fault of the delicate crystal glass, surely.

Too direct of a situation. What if you put the glass on an unstable shelf? What if the glass rests right on the edge and it gets knocked down? What if, even, your jumping caused it to fall?

Yes, you didn’t directly drop it, but you used false security. Placing it on the shelf kept it no safer than if you would have dropped it yourself directly. But you’re angry. It’s not your fault. It’s not the shelf’s fault. It’s the glass’s fault, as far as you’re concerned. You didn’t place it insecurely. You didn’t jump around causing it to fall. Or wait…

That’s the fundamental conflict. You can’t incite a disaster and blame the disaster. It can still be your fault even if you didn’t exactly flip the switch. Even though this time you did.

Shall we press on? The glass didn’t break too badly the first time, and so you mended it. You mended it, but them you dropped it again. You kept doing this. Mend. Drop. Mend. Drop. Mend. Drop. Mend. Drop. But it was your favorite glass, you thought, so you continued to mend.

Each time the pieces got smaller and smalle; it became harder and harder to mend. You tried anyway. The glass tried to help you. Each time, though, it got worse and worse. The mending was worse and worse. There were holes and missing pieces. The glass could barely be held without falling apart.

You had stopped holding it anyways. You had moved on to new ones.

Finally it broke one final time. You didn’t even need to drop it. You just walked past it. It collapsed into a heap. You didn’t try to mend it. You didn’t throw it out. You didn’t care. You just left it there on the shelf in a heap of glass shards.

Although it had once been so important, although it had done so much, there were new ones now. It was nothing.

The only thing you would say is that you didn’t do anything.