I briefly toyed with the idea that I should try to convince her that nothing I had told her was true. That we were more magical realism than science fiction, specifically that branch of literary fiction that comes complete with an unreliable narrator. That I wasn't really an alien. That I was a human who'd had a breakdown, and there was nothing extraterrestrial or extramarital about me. Gulliver might have known what he had seen, but Gulliver had a fragile mind. I could easily denied everything. A dog's health fluctuates. People fall off roofs and survive. After all, humans - especially adult ones - want to believe the most mundane truths possible. They need to, in order to stop their worldviews, and their sanity, from capsizing and plunging them into the vast ocean of incomprehensible.
But it seemed too disrespectful, somehow, and I couldn't do it. Lies were everywhere on this planet, but true love had its name for a reason. And if a narrator tells you it was just a dream, you want to tell him he has simply passed from one delusion into another one, and he could wake from this new reality at any time. You had to stay consistent to life's delusions. All you had was your perspective, so objective truth was meaningless. You has to choose a dream and stick with it. Everything else was a con. And once you had tasted truth and love in the same potent cocktail, there had to be no more tricks. But while I knew I couldn't correct this version of things with any integrity, living with it was hard.
The Humans, P263-264
Matt Haig
ISBN 978-0-85786-876-3
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