It took 13.8 billion years for the innumerable particles in the universe to align and arrange themselves in precisely one way—a specific way such that in this moment in time and space, these words have come into existence, for both you and I. And yet, the truth remains hidden, omitted, veiled.
Look around, look at all those eyes that stare back at you, cluelessly. Look at all those eyes that avoid your gaze, blinkingly. Look at all the words unspoken, all the words forced to remain unspoken, all the words punished because they were lies, all the words threatened because they were truths.
I am but one man, born in one moment, alive in another, born to my mother and my father, in a small town in India. Living in India, growing up in India, I never had to think about who I was; I never had to think about my identity. Everyone was the same; everyone was different in their own way. It was only once I looked outside the borders on the map that I realized—I was told—that I was brown. Before that, I was just a boy—either dark-skinned or light-skinned, depending on who you ask and compare to. Before I was brown, I was just a boy who was told in endless advertisements that if only I bought a particular face cream, I could live a life that was fairer and lovelier than the one I had been living. That was my reality. That was my truth—my personal truth—before I was an immigrant; when I belonged without having to earn my place.
I could sit here and type endlessly on this plastic, turning calories into pixels, sacrificing something of myself to give to you, because energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transferred or transformed. Is that what truth is, too? That it can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed? I digress…
So then, in all this business of sacrificing, as my spine struggles to keep me upright, what more do I tell you? How much do I have to tell you for the truth to pop out and spill on the page—to you! who will never know me anyway, because no matter what I say, even if I run out of all the words in me, you will never really know me, because who has ever known anyone truly? The best we can hope for is for someone to understand us, to have some compassion, some empathy, at least some sympathy. Still, no one has ever truly known anyone, because we all have pieces of ourselves we keep hidden, locked in a box even Pandora's curiosity could not open.
Because we’re not just hiding the truth from others, we hide it from ourselves. We walk around the world, staring at screens staring at people staring at screens, obsessed with our looks, the fine lines on our faces, and the passage of time leaving its marks on our skin, yet hardly ever looking at our deeper selves, hardly ever looking within, trying but failing; and so the truth keeps evading our gaze.
I tell you that I see you, sitting in my own solitude, always seeking it yet afraid of having it, trying to escape it while looking at people living their lives through a six-inch screen.
Write until the truth pops out1. Write until the words bleed and pour out of my veins, I tell myself, as I watch real blood spill out around the world on the little screen in my hands. What can words do, what can they bleed, when the truth can’t be let out? What is truth anyway?
Is it not just words, empty and powerless, brought to life by the ones telling the stories? Two people can look at the same thing and have two different truths—diametrically opposed yet in co-existence.
Truths, half-truths, omitted truths—take your pick and barge on until you or the other is satisfied with it. Speak it and write it and shout it and carve it, let out your personal truth.
Because no matter how much you try, if you just keep going, keep writing, keep hiding, someday, one day, the truth will show up unexpectedly, in whispers and in shadows, and it will grab hold of you and it will shatter you and it will lift you up, all at once, and you will have to choose whether you accept it and use it for good or if you suppress it until the faucet runs amok—
And so it comes out, in faded whispers, as I write more and more and more. And it will come out for you, too. And only then, once the truth pops out, will the story be worth telling.
As with many things in my life, this piece and its title were inspired by Lin-Manuel Miranda: When The Truth Pops Out by Lin-Manuel Miranda