Pretend

After a point I think we both knew I was only pretending to pretend. Trying to make it easy on you, so you wouldn't have to deal with the fact that I believed in something that could never come true. So you wouldn't have to trot out the usual reasons, the old arguments I knew so well I could have recited them in my sleep, knew them the way one knows a line of poetry or a speech from a play, one rehearsed so often it no longer means what it was meant to say. So we could spend all day laughing at my foolishness, my silly play-acting, and I could go home and drink myself to sleep every night, secure in the knowledge that I could tell you anything, anything at all. But the truth.