Chapters 5 + 6. Solomon + Kerry and the Lies We Tell Amongst Friends, Lovers, and Other Assorted Assholes.

Everyone lies - especially those we calls our friends, and even more those we our lovers. Everyone is an asshole for it, and no one will apologize or change.

In a double chapter featuring two of the shortest character vignettes in the The Lying Liars Who Lied When They Said They Loved You universe, we meet the narrator's car guy - Solomon, or Sol (no one calls him that) - piece by piece dismantling the narrator's car because of a boy, and then we meet the once-powerful now-porcine Kerry whose enthusiasm over two 'pussies' on a dating app rather than the two penises in his bedroom causes the narrator go flaccid and stale.

None of these people are interested in each sexually or romantically - and barely platonically - but yet, here they are, doing drugs together and exploding their own disaster onto each other's lives and calling it just another day. Disaster means attention, and all attention is good so long as they get your name right, after all.

Or, so you tell yourself.

These are the lies we tell each other and ourselves when we realize it’s easier to make something than to admit that nobody here is here for anyone else - and nobody coming through the door will be, either. The lighter and the bubble make it easy to pretend you chose these people, and to ignore the loneliness and hurt left by the last person you did choose, who walked out the door and never returned because they hadn’t chosen you.

Everybody lies because nobody wants to be honest and say everything is wrong and no one's going to make it right. Or that the necessity of another person breeds contempt, not affection. And we definitely lie more easily to people we hate.

The Lying Liars Who Lied When They Said They Loved You is a fictionalized, semi-autobiographical novel and podcast exploring toxic relationships, codependency, substance abuse, and the men who taught me how to mistake their survival for love. Every episode is another man. More lies ahead.