My friend Ss told me his father lied and stole his family’s right to the truth. I remembered his story when I read the Literary Quote about “when you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth.”
“At the ripe old age of 65, my father walked out of our family home and never came back.”
“What happened?”
“We searched for many days. The days became weeks and months. We couldn’t find him at his usual haunts. We asked everybody we knew, if they had seen our father.”
“Then one day, someone told us Father was alive. He was living in a house, on the opposite side of our street, right across town.”
I don’t know how the patriarch managed to steal time from his work day, to set up another home in a house on the opposite side of town. He had been working into old age. Or so his family thought. It seems like their father told a lie about working. He had money saved up. He needn’t continue to work as he had retired and withdrawn his pension in a lump sum.
He may have been busy setting up his other home, far away from his old first home, way across the other side of town.
“I asked that person, what was my father doing in that house. Than man told me he saw a complete family living there.”
I said, “I’m very sorry to hear this. How is your mother handling this?”
“She can not do anything about it. My father told many lies about going to work and being busy. We never knew what he was doing. We trusted him after all those years being a family. We never suspected he wanted to leave us. We were worried for so many months. Our father hid the truth and he stole our former happiness as a family. He also stole our right to the truth. We only discovered the truth when that family friend told us he saw our father living in a house across town.”
I wonder, why do some men have second wind to live a second life, and throw the first life away? They act as if they see the grass as being greener on the other side of town.
Related:
This Literary Quote is the writing prompt for this story – “when you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth.”― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner. Violet’s Lentz hosts this prompt at her post https://violetslentz.home.blog/2026/04/23/the-machine/
Having never understood why humans seem to have a need to force themselves to become monogamous beings- I am not quite as disturbed by the father’s actions as some might be. I think the singularity of matrimony puts a weight on everyone- that most people are just not wired to bear. I am sorry the mother married someone that unlike herself was not of the monogamous sort- and for the children because their father had to choose one woman- and thus leave one set of children out of the family unit. but this doesn’t cause me to be angry at the man- who in the end made a decision to be true to himself above all.
As you can see, this story made me think- and that is always a good thing. Thank you so much for sharing your inspiration drawn on this wonderful literary quote!
Thank you for sharing your views.
I think reactions are why many men avoid confrontations, by sneaking away. Humans have a common trait that’s called jealousy. Spouses don’t want to share maybe because of jealousy. Spouses can’t divide their time between their own pursuits and their spouse. Or a spouse throws in the towel and thinks he/ she has reached the end of the line and want to disappear.
This self analysis, while trying explain why men turn to other women when their marriages don’t work well, has made me think about another case, when the man returned to his wife, because his girlfriend’s attempted bonding didn’t work with him. Thanks, for directing Violet’s Lens to focus on another aspect.