Eloquence

Truth never parades out boldly to bare itself to the world.  Rather, it stumbles out and stutters over itself.  It finds itself without a voice, unable to meet the eye, incapable of coming forward.  It is fragile and tenuous, it forgets itself and turns around again and again on its way forward.  All bravery lost, every desire to make sense abandoned.  In a frenzied rush out of the mouth and into the world, truth is torn between an incomprehensible desire to escape and a vicious anguished fear of being discovered.

Real truth does not know eloquence or elegance.  Not the truth that really matters, that which really hurts and scrapes and grates.  This is the truth that is planned and anticipated and repeated in preparation for its entrance into the world.  No matter how well-rehearsed, how practiced, how carefully arranged and neatly tidied up to include only the barest necessities, it falls flat.  When it finally escapes, the tone is not as it should have been, it was said too quickly or too slowly, it may have skipped a word or three.  No matter how, the truth tumbled out and didn't quite hit the points it meant to.

Truth does not follow neat lines or smooth laws.  It grates and scrapes to the very end.  It is full of blades and agony fashioned in such a way that it could really only hurt.  The purpose of letting truth out of its cage is to heal, to improve, to make better, to fix problems and arrange the messy elements of life into something that makes sense.  But truth is cruel and it is harsh.  It has a bitter power to hurt unlike any other because there is no sugar-coating, no elegantly arranged particles to make it easier to handle.

So when truth has finally emerged in all its lethal glory, there remain no other options than to swallow it whole and see what can be done about the damage after the fact.  There are no ways to stop it from hurting.  The most beautiful of words will crumble before it and the simple, painful realities will find a way to emerge from every coating imaginable.  Truth emerges eventually, never as neatly as it was planned.  It occasionally falls to pieces, sometimes collapses into piles of rubble, and every once in a while bursts into flames, destroying everything it was meant to ameliorate.

But that is the awful game that truth must play.  From being hidden bitterly to being coughed up agonizingly. It is the one thing perhaps that is feared the most, and the one thing that is sometimes the most necessary.  Truth knows no such thing as eloquence.  It knows only the simple, harsh realities which, by its nature, it cannot hide.