Liar, liar, pants on fire, nose is as long as a telephone wire.

Trigger warning: sexism, child abuse, dating, US culture. Kinda not tame.

The last guy I date, only we don’t date, is a liar.

It is a bit into Covid. He knows I’ve had three pneumonias and he texts. “Are you worried about this?”

“Heck, yeah. Of course.” Then I ask if we can talk on the phone.

We start doing distanced beach walks and talking. Talk, talk, talk. At first he has to lure me out.

“Want to go for a beach walk?”

“I dunno.”

“I made lunch.”

“Oh, then yes!”

He points out that I have food insecurity. He is annoyingly correct. By the end of any meal, I am checking to see if there is food for the next meal. It is automatic and dates to when I was a toddler.

We compared abusive childhoods. Really. Back to toddlers. He finally says, “You win.”

“What?” I am not trying to win.

“Your childhood was more abusive than mine.”

I think various unprintable words.

I start noticing lies. They are stupid lies, as far as I am concerned. They shut me up over time because there really is no reply except, “Uh, why are you lying? I am not believing any of that.”

He says he is really really smart. Ok, fine. He says he can read my mind. I do some attempt at a girlie modest shy face which probably more resembles a grimace. But he is deep in his dream lies and honestly, notices me less and less. When he says he can read my mind, I know he can’t, because he’d be horrified by the swearing and laughter.

He is the smartest one in the room, though, he says modestly, often people don’t realize it. I nod and keep looking for calcedony nodules, aka agates. He’s better at finding them than me. I am automatically competitive, but that’s on an upper level of my mind. At the deeper level I could care less.

I also do not care if he’s trying to impress me with his smarts. My feminist level laughs hysterically and thinks nasty nasty nasty thoughts. But I have a deeper level that can love most people. I keep that stuff hidden and I know he can’t read it. Though I can read him: not his mind, but my inner psychiatrist gets involved and wants to know, why does he lie? And he’s lying to himself, not me. I don’t believe a word, but I am interested. What is the goal, here? Why lie?

He had a perfect marriage. I can’t control my expression on THAT one. Uh, doesn’t exist, hon. Why THAT lie? It starts to sort out. Well, in a way it was perfect. Perfect for him. Not perfect for his wife. She was super super depressed. Guess none of that was his fault. Our absolutely sexist culture. And now I know why he is hanging out with me. I am depressed. But it is situational and temporary. I need to close my clinic and I still have a year on the lease. And I will go work temp doctoring, but it is risky. I may get pneumonia a fourth time and it could kill or disable me. So I cannot take the risk of closing early and paying off the lease as a temp. I have to work the year out and I am really down. He is looking for a depressed woman and I seem to fit the bill. And I am a doctor. Who better for a really smart male to control than a woman who is smart enough to become a doctor (but not as smart as him).

Well, it all blows up after a year. I close my clinic, go work as a temp, and keep walking in to rooms where patients have their masks off. It only takes me five week to get bad Covid, even though I am masked and even though I ask the clinic manager, the nurses, the medical assistants to have people keep their masks on. I am down and this time I need oxygen.

Pneumonia for me comes with tachycardia and the opposite of brain fog. The tachycardia makes me drop ten pounds in the first week and wires my brain like a rocket. I wake up in the morning anxious like that cartoon of the cat attached to the ceiling with all four paws and fur all on end.

He says, “Pneumonia makes your brain go faster.”

I say, “Nope.”

“No? What do you mean?”

I say, “My brain is the same speed as it always is. But when I have this, I can’t hide it.”

“I don’t like that idea at all.” Yeah, that is the moment when our relationship is done. By him, not me. For one thing, I am no longer depressed. For another, he is the smartest person in the room. But. My brain might be faster. He says, “I can follow what you say, but you don’t even take a breath when you switch from one topic to another and I can barely keep up.” Yeah, well, sorry. That’s why I bloody well hide it most of the time. Because our culture dislikes smart women A LOT. It’s okay, barely, for a woman to be a physician, but men don’t want to date them. They wouldn’t mind screwing them. My maternal uncle told my mother that he was looking for a wife, “But I don’t want a woman who is smarter than I am.” My mother snarled about my uncle for weeks. Go, mom.

So this guy was a liar. But maybe I was a liar too. I shut up once he started lying and I shut the gates and doors of the vast garden and jungle that is my mind. No entry to people lying to themselves. There is a public garden in my mind that they can visit, but the rest is closed, hidden, contains the entire ocean and the deep trench, and maybe the universe.

And I haven’t dated since. Because I can’t stand that the virginal disney princess girl mythos in our culture feeds the sexist child abusive Epstein and all the men with him. And bloody well don’t say, “But there are some men that aren’t like Epstein.” Yeah? Well then why aren’t they fighting the Epstein crowd to the death with guns and knives. Until all the men are protecting all the children, all the girls and all the boys, and the gay folk and lesbians and trans and different races and yeah, I expect you to model Kwan Yin and protect EVERYONE from being abused. Meanwhile, men can stay the heck away from me. And yes, you can substitute a lot of swears for the word heck.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: tame. I think this is not a tame subject.