It starts with a little white lie.

Something went wrong, or maybe it just didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. You messed up, you didn’t notice, you forgot. Then suddenly, what seems like years later but is probably only moments, the consequences are staring you in the face. You realize what you did, you know that it was all your fault. That’s when the panic sets in.

Whether you meant to do it or not, you’re now a full-blown con artist. Every choice you make, everything you do becomes this non-stop crusade to cover up the original mistake, no matter how small or inconsequential it originally was. The panic feeds on itself, morphing into fear, then terror. Your face reddens, and your heartbeat pounds louder than it should, even when you’re sitting still. Everywhere you look, there it is. Staring at you with its beady little eyes, possibly snarling.

A key stroke, a decimal point, a single letter in a single word. Like murder by omission, only worse.

Before you know it, you’ve destroyed yourself in an attempt to keep the world from seeing you as imperfect, as fallible. What was so bad about the original mistake in the first place, you ask yourself? Why did it seem so imperative that no one ever knew? Was it worth the bloodshed, the additional lies, the self-hatred?

But then, that’s the thing about lies, isn’t it? They’re like Lays potato chips; you can never really stop at just one.