[A middle-aged woman with an uninteresting appearance but very eloquent.]
“As a sales rep, I spend two-thirds of my time on business trips, which limits my world to the realm of airport gates, hotel lobbies, manager’s offices… it’s a very lonely existence as you can imagine, unless you are able to engage in casual conversation, small talk, insubstantial chatter.
And I’m terrible at it.
So much so, that every time I found myself in that kind of situation, I tended to embellish my stories a little, just to keep people’s attention. Because let’s face it, no one is really interested in what I have to say.
And so, when my cat died of old age, I told the lady sitting next to me on the plane that my house had burnt to the ground with my kitty in it… and that the fire had then spread to the whole block, killing six people.
When I broke up with my boyfriend of ten years, I confessed to a hotel receptionist that he had left because I was spending too much time with my terminally ill mother… who had a strange virus that forced her to live inside a plastic bubble.
Also, this time when I had horrible diarrhea, I told a sales manager I had recently been shot in the stomach… after getting caught in the crossfire between the police and some bank robbers who were trying to flee with millions in cash.
(sigh)
I swear I didn’t do it expecting pity, or admiration, or whatever… like I said, I just wanted to sound interesting.
And it seemed harmless to me. You know, imagining tragedies in order to engage with people I would never see again in my life.
But I’ll admit it had become an obsession. I was always looking forward to meeting the next stranger so I could spin a new, even more incredible yarn… I don’t know if I could have quit doing it on my own.
But, in fact, I did stop altogether one day.
As you’ve probably guessed, it took a real personal tragedy to make me realize how wrong it was to lie about things like that.
That tragedy was my father’s passing… in a terrible plane crash. It was one of the worst in the history of civil aviation… no survivors and hundreds of victims on the ground as it came down in the middle of a small Midwestern town.”
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Copyright Abel Gonzalez 2016