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It all began with a lie.

Quickly told, deftly executed, but a lie nonetheless. Conventional wisdom will tell you that anything based on a foundation of lies will only be destined to failure and ruination. "The centre cannot hold" and all that other literary bollocks. I was never one for conventional wisdom or literary merit, mind. The lie was this:

"I love you, Meg."

Four simple words to make a girl's heart melt. Like putty, I was, in his arms, giving way to tender caresses and whispered platitudes. I should have known better. As my mum had told me, "Men are scum. Men are evil, Megan. Don't trust them. All they want is your sex, nothing else." I always chalked up her attitudes toward the fact that my father was an alcoholic who was known to stick it in anything with a hole in it, and on many occasions did. She'd chatter on about what he was doing wrong, how he was doing it wrong, why he was doing it wrong, and most importantly that he was a "bloody guzzling, soaking sot."

No, I'm not sure exactly what that means either, but whatever it was, my mum was intent on calling it my father. See, my parents were first generation Canadians; both emigrated from various parts of England, half the time in my house I wondered if they were even speaking English.

Things Falling Apart

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

-- William Butler Yeats