Mythomania

Dad diagnosed me when I was ten, when I told my math teacher I was fleeing from police. He didn't believe me and then no one ever did again. I got nicknamed "liar" and everything I said from "my favorite food is spaghetti" to "I have a bachelors degree is Applied Chemistry" became labeled as a lie. I didn't see the school psychiatrist, I just saw my dad.

He makes me call him Dr. Dodge in meetings. He files weekly reports and has me on all sorts of experimental medication. He is a big shot psychiatrist in the East Wing of Mason Rehabilitation in NYC. The one will all the serial killers that escaped death row by pledging insanity like it was a Boy Scout motto. Dad spends all his spare time sleeping. He's become an Olympic athlete in the sport of snoring. Sometimes I think when he is sleeping on the couch, his snores are speaking. They say, he is the only sane one in the family. That is probably true.

I find myself writing lists a lot. I thinks it is because mother is an obsessive compulsive with an obsession with the color yellow. She buys leal pads and leaves them in my room and I write lists on them. Lists Like,

Things I am good at:
1. Lying to my parents
2. Sipping sleeping pills in dad's coffee
3. Finding drug stores without security cameras so I can sneak condoms out of metallic packages.

I tell dad that Mom's probably killed half the amazon rain forest buying me these leal pads and I don't think they are sucking octopuses dry of ink fast enough for pens so I can fill them. He tells me to keep writing lists so that my subconscious appear slips through on sheets of paper instead of between my lips.

Things I am not good at,
1. Singing. I stand in the back in chorus and pretend to move my mouth, but Mr. sanders swears I must have other oral talents to make up for them. So he asked me to demonstrate.
2. Sleeping--I'll miss something if I sleep, so I stay up self-medicating with ADD and depression medications.
3. Telling the truth.

Mom says goodbye in the morning by tapping my head three times and spelling duck backwards. Those are her other "compulsives" as dad says on days when he decides not to be narcoleptic. I was awake one night and I asked him if OCD ran in the family. He fell asleep before I finished the question. It was okay though because Brad was waiting outside. Brad is my boyfriend and yes, Brad exists. Sometimes I wonder what words he would use to describe me
1. Patient
2. Kind
3. Easy
I don't let him come in because I am afraid mom will slap him three times while spelling him name backwards. But maybe thats not as bad as dad falling asleep in a plate of meatloaf. I doubt either of them will ever let him in or let me leave, so I keep writing lists on legal pads, hoping some truth might come out.

Dad says ill grow out of it and if I hear him use the phrase, phase one more time I am going to blow sky high like a hot air ballon. Dad would call that a lie too; he says, pathological are prone to hyperbole.

At school I could say my name and no one would even bonder believing me, because "the liar" is so much easier to say. Brad doesn't believe one word that falls out of my mouth, he just thinks I'm a good lay and that other stuff just doesn't get in his way. He loves me though and I know that someday the things I say will wash over him like rain and he will know its the truth and he will be the first in a long line of people who will start believing in me again.

People I want to stop lying to.
1. Brad
2. My parents
3. Myself