On the Fluidity of Truth

Truth moves. It slips out of definition. It belongs to no one.

There was a time I thought truth sat still. I thought it lived in books or in men with loud voices or in the hands of those who claimed to know better. I thought it waited patiently in one place, like a stone in the riverbed, untouched by the current.

But I don’t believe that anymore.

Truth moves. It slips out of definition. It belongs to no one. It gathers stories like rain gathers dirt — changing colour, weight, shape as it travels. Truth grows old. Truth grows up. Truth falls apart and returns in a different form.

Perhaps this is why systems try to nail it down. Why religion sets rules. Why governments write laws in stone. Why history is printed without footnotes. They are terrified of how wild truth really is. How it answers to no flag or empire or god.

The truth of my childhood is not the truth I live by now. The truth of who I was in that house, under those rules, in that skin — has washed away in the tide of becoming someone else.

And still — the world tells me to pick a side. To declare one thing forever true. To say: this is it. This is how it is. This is how it will always be.

But I am not stone. I am water.

I know better than to trust anything that does not move.

Truth is not what you win an argument with. Truth is what you live with when no one is watching. It’s quiet. It’s aching. It’s contradictory. It will ask you to hold two things at once — the thing you were sure of, and the thing that ruins it.

The world is full of people who want to own truth. I want to love it instead.

I want to watch it change.

I want to let it go.

I think about how many kinds of truth there are. The kind you feel in your body before language. The kind that is only true for a moment, like the way light hits a wall at a certain hour and then is gone forever. The kind that belongs to a community. The kind that is stolen by power. The kind you whisper to yourself when you cannot bear the louder voices.

Truth is a living thing. It grows teeth. It grows wings. It sheds skin. It survives in quiet places, far away from microphones and marble halls.

I do not believe in universal truth. I believe in lived truth. I believe in the fragile, fierce truth that exists between people who refuse to look away from each other’s pain. I believe in the truth that ruins me and rebuilds me in the same breath.

Let them have their stone tablets. Let them carve their declarations into walls that will crumble sooner or later.

I will walk into the river. I will stand in the current. I will let the water take what it will.

Whatever stays — I will call that truth.