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The Biggest Lie
The Biggest Lie
When we were very little, my brother and I used to play together all the time. We went from building houses on the stairs with a lot of blankets and all of my toy kitchen appliances, hanging in there for ages, to creating our take on a small beach at the backyard of our house. Actually, I even used to put my dresses to my brother at times when he didn’t had a clue of what was going on, and I did it several times until one day he got so mad at me for doing that that he actually hit me, and it was pretty painful. We used to do a lot of crazy stuff until one day, I don’t remember exactly what we wanted to accomplish, we went into my dad’s cantina at our house and we started filling it with candles and many other kinds of things, my guess is that we were trying to make some sort of a small house inside there. My dad has a lot of fragile things and stuff that we could get hurt with in his cantina, so when he saw both of us playing in there he got so mad. He was actually really angry, and when he started asking us questions so that he could find out who was the one who got the idea to start filling up his cantina with random stuff, I immediately pointed my finger to my brother. Since he was very little (two years younger than me), my dad of course knew that I was the one who was the responsible of the mess that we did inside of his cantina. I’ve always seen my dad as this very calm person, especially when it comes to me, so I was so surprised to see him so mad and I got very scared when he started raising his voice and was reprimanding me. The thing is that he wasn’t that mad about the mess we had done inside his cantina, he was actually madder about the fact that I lied to him and also blamed my innocent brother so that I wouldn’t get punished. Of course I was sent to my room without any privileges and eventually my dad came and had a conversation with me. I remember that he told me that everybody lies, even him, but that there is a big difference between a white lie (like telling him that I ate 2 chocolates instead of 5, for example) and a lie that will harm other people. He also told me that it was very important to be sincere with the people that you love (and everyone else of course). This event really hit me hard and since that moment I learnt the importance of being honest. It’s kind of like when you don’t know that something that you’re doing is bad until something happens to you, like someone that drinks and doesn’t really believe that he could harm someone for drinking and driving, but when he takes someone else’s life it suddenly hits him and realizes that what he did was so wrong.
María Fernanda Pérez Barragán
