A BEAUTIFUL MIND

"Do you trust me"? she asked. For a moment there I was dumbfounded for how could I tell a woman I just shared my bed with, that the word trust was a vocabulary lacking in my dictionary of life. How mean I would be and how unromantic I will be considered, so I did what everyman does when he’s caught up. I lied.

Tonight, I sit here wandering about my inability to trust another soul, my unfailing reflexes to quickly second guess every word that comes out of another person’s lips and the biggest question, would I ever be able to trust again.

My mother calls it a gift; I consider it a curse for which mind is constantly on the lookout for the worst in people. Which brain quickly assimilates information today and is able to detect a contrary statement ten years later. It is as if I am a “walking talking” lie detector.

So when you asked me if I trusted you, how could I tell you the truth?
How could I tell you that I saw the facial expression when you lied about never having a thing for him? How could I tell you that the remorse and anger I detected in your voice each time you spoke his name were signs that you were still not over him even though you said you were. How could I tell you that I noticed the different ways you kissed me every night as if you were sampling different men in your head or were all these a figment of my beautiful mind?

A beautiful mind, I guess that is the disease that plagues my inability to trust. You say a “yes” today and tomorrow you claim you said a “no”. To you, it might be forgetfulness but to my beautiful mind it registers as inconsistency, tantamount to distrust. You might not want to soil my opinion of you, so you water down your attraction for the same sex. Oh! how you give it all away when you talk about her, the way you rush to answer her texts, the way you yearn not to do any wrong by her and the way she easily replaces me as priority whenever she calls. How can I say I trust you when you wouldn’t tell me the truth or is this also all in my beautiful mind?

It’s amazing the way a man’s imagination and beliefs can place him in his own world. Where fantasies play out as reality and he simply can’t draw the distinction. Is this what is happening to me? Is your failure to admit the truth causing my insanity or am I becoming like Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie, Shutter Island?

Then it hit me that, I didn’t lie. In fact, all this time I have been trusting you, because, which would you consider to be a better definition for trust? Is it

A. Accepting and believing every single word that comes from the person you claim to trust and having absolutely no doubts about what he or she said even if the story is outrageous.

Or is it

B. Choosing to accept and believing what the person you claim to trust is saying despite your doubts?

I trust that option B is a much better definition for how can Christians say they trust in God to heal them when they have no physical evidence of even His existence. So I guess loving you despite all that I have noticed and my commitment to staying faithful to you forever testify that I have began to trust again.

My mind may never stop what I have come to term as “continuous assessment”, nor my eyes fail to pick up micro expressions but my ears will constantly listen to your words and my heart will learn to accept them. For I believe that one may be deceived if one trust’s too much, but one will live in torment unless one learns to trust enough.