Jar of Hearts

That's what liars did. They lied. And then they lied some more to protect those lies.

Whoever said lying was hard was so, so wrong. Lying was easy. Lying was like a hot knife slicing through room-temperature butter. Lying was a bunch of words strung together in a pretty sentence designed to make the other person feel like everything was fine. Telling the truth, however, was impossible.

But the guilt? It never leaves. It hangs around like a bad smell that no amount of bleach can eliminate. You can get yourself a new life, get yourself a new love, go to jail for the terrible thing you helped do... but the guilt is still there, stinking like an invisible piece of rotting garbage underneath your bed that won't go away no matter how many attempts you make to clean it. Because that smell - of rotting flesh, of rotting soul - is you.

Everyone has a single defining moment in life, something that thrusts them irrevocably into a new direction, something that affects them at their core, something that changes them forever.

The past is always with you, whether you choose to think about it or not, whether you take responsibility for it or not. You carry the past with you because it transforms you. You can try to bury it and pretend it never happened, but that doesn't work. Because buried things can, and do, come back.

The past needs to stay in the past; it's the only way to keep moving forward.