update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/idumea/005.md

@@ -42,11 +42,11 @@ While I fetched us both such a glass, I said, "What is it that brings you here?
 
 "Oh, very much so. I remember being her, yes, but that was nigh on three centuries ago, and I do not quite understand who she has become, myself." I handed over the glass of water and gestured toward the couch, where we sat on either end, half-facing each other.
 
-"She was still pleasant to be around, at least," The Woman said. "She said that I should seek you out, along with Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself, Where It Watches The Slow Hours Progress, And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights, and Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps. You are the last on my list."
+"She was still pleasant to be around, at least," The Woman said. "She said that I should seek you out, along with Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself, Where It Watches The Slow Hours Progress, and Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps. You are the last on my list."
 
 "That is curious. What was the reasoning for those names?"
 
-"A writer, an actor, a musician, and an artist. I have been having some thoughts on joy that I would like to explore with each of you."
+"A writer, a poet, and a musician. I have been having some thoughts on joy that I would like to explore with each of you."
 
 She told me her story, much as I have written it to you, readers. She spoke of the ways of seeking out joy, of diving into the pleasures of food — and I can tell you, friends, she is absolutely correct about tam mak hoong; it is *incredibly* delicious — and the pleasures of touch and sensuality and sexuality. She told me of how much joy she had found in such things, and the rekindled relationship with Her Lover, and she also told me of how these joys were lovely, but not the joys that she was seeking, and that she had three more items on her list of five. She had entertainment, creativity, and spiritual fulfilment yet to go.
 
@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@ I do not know if you have ever been complimented in just the right way by just t
 
 The Woman, this skunk who sat before me with a glass of water held in her paws and her very chic outfit, the one who had smiled to me with such earnestness as to be a blessing, this woman who was too much herself, had just perceived me with such force as to leave me feeling bowled over. Even today, even these many years later, I remember that compliment and find breath catching in my throat, and we have already spoken on that, have we not?
 
-We sat in silence, then, while I processed this. My friends, you may perhaps have picked up the sense that The Woman is in some fundamental way broken and perhaps unable to interact well with others. After all, she sits for so long in her room and in her home and on her field, and she sees Her Friend only with some frequency, and had only just recently gotten in touch with Her Lover, yes? But that is not wholly true. She was too much herself, yes, and she would have said even then that she had lived for too long and that she was in some fundamental way broken, but she was also so much more! I have shown you all that she was through her own perception, but from the outside...ah, she was hard not to love, my friends.
+We sat in silence, then, while I processed this. My friends, you may perhaps have picked up the sense that The Woman is in some fundamental way broken and perhaps unable to interact well with others. After all, she sits for so long in her room and in her home and on her field, and she sees Her Friend only with some frequency, and had only just recently gotten in touch with Her Lover, yes? And that is in many ways true. But it is not *wholly* true. She was too much herself, yes, and she would have said even then that she had lived for too long and that she was in some fundamental way broken, but she was also so much more! I have shown you all that she was through her own perception, but from the outside...ah, she was hard not to love, my friends.
 
 "Thank you, my dear," I said at last, bowing.
 
@@ -147,4 +147,54 @@ Readers, I am not ashamed to say that I cried again. How could I not, after all?
 
 I cried, and through it all, The Woman sat in kind silence.
 
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+When, now for the second time, I was able to sit up straight again, able breath slowly, able to look at The Woman instead of my paws as I covered my face, I bowed to her and said, "Thank you for telling me these things. I did not realize just how much I needed to hear them."
+
+"Why?"
+
+The Woman's simple question left me all the room in the world to admit that I did not know. I think that until she asked it, I was not quite sure why, myself. I *had* needed to hear those things but, yes: why? I do not think I would have been able to tell her as part of my statement, but that syllable forced my thoughts into order in a way that they are not as I write this, six years later.
+
+"Because I have not internalized the immediacy of the attack," I said. "I did not know Should We Forget. I never met No Longer Myself. I met and spoke with Beckoning and Muse, yes, but only once. You telling me these things — me hearing them — was enough to make me realize that I have not truly grieved them, not properly. Your story of Warmth grieving helped me understand em better, and your story of Beholden's music and how she told you not to listen to it for her assignments made me realize that I, too, am only just starting to process the loss."
+
+"I understand. I was forced to confront the immediacy of Should We Forget no longer being with us from the very first day, and I am used to thinking of my stanza in terms of loss. We lost Death Itself and I Do Not Know, yes? We knew loss in a way more immediate within the clade except perhaps by those of the second stanza, who lost their first line, too, yes?"
+
+"Was there a difference for you? Death Itself and I Do Not Know quit, but Should We Forget was taken from you."
+
+The Woman tilted her head, then gazed out the sliding glass door that led out to my little patio. "I think I knew, on some level, that Death Itself would leave us. I certainly suspected when she went all but catatonic, yes? But I knew. I had no such foreknowledge of Should We Forget leaving us. I suspect that none did, except perhaps Slow Hours, and she told me that her dreams did not make sense until after the fact." She returned her gaze to me. "So yes. There was a difference. The feeling surrounding Death Itself and I Do Not Know is a tired acceptance. They *were* a tired acceptance even immediately after. The feeling surrounding Should We Forget is a sharp and cold grief. It is a feeling of my world being upended and my footing no longer being sure."
+
+"It did not feel stable after Lagrange came back, no."
+
+"It did not. That, I am told, is why Beholden wrote her threnody: Beckoning was lost to the Attack and Muse quit out of grief one week later. Beholden, fearing that her life was unstable, declined the merge. She told me that she feared that accepting it would change who she was on a fundamental level, only for her to die, not loving her partner in the same way that she had for hundreds of years beforehand. A Finger Pointing has Beckoning's memories, but Muse is truly dead, now. Her memories have been dismissed and cannot be retrieved."
+
+"I see," I said. "And so she memorialized what memories she did have in the form of her samples."
+
+"There are many memorials now, are there not? There are many tokens. There are many metallic flowers and songs of laughter."
+
+I smiled. "There is poetry in your words, my dear."
+
+She bowed from where she sat, smiling. "And so I come to you, Rye."
+
+"So you do. You have read with Slow Hours. What shall we do to help you on your path to joy?"
+
+"Write."
+
+I laughed. I do not think it was an unkind laugh, but it was a startled one. I am a writer, yes, but I do not fancy myself much of a teacher. I do not think I am much of a collaborator, either. I get quite protective of my work, and I can be something of a bitch when it comes to having it challenged. "How shall we write, then?" I asked. "I write with A Finger Pointing. We send each other letters back and forth, telling stories."
+
+"Perhaps that is a thing we can do, too, but this is a project that I would like to approach as a conversation. I do not have an agenda for how, simply that I must."
+
+"Have you written before?"
+
+She shook her head. "No, I have not. I have not created much since becoming who I am, I am sorry to say. My stanza will occasionally tell each other stories, however, and I always fancied myself quite good at that."
+
+I nodded. "A story is a good place to start, yes. You really have made so little?"
+
+"My last century has been spent focusing inwards and meting my time out carefully for reasons I cannot explain. I have been seeking a form of stillness, perhaps."
+
+Ah! This was it! My friends, this was the point when I realized just what it was that made each of The Woman's smiles feel like blessings and what made it feel like she bore some power within her that I could not quite understand. It was her *stillness.* My astute readers will remember that she had a thought, some few thousand words ago: perhaps this unbecoming that her mind circled around was simply the utmost in stillness. 
+
+Now, your narrator did not know this at the time — I do not even know now that this was the thought she had that day, but I am a storyteller, and so that is part of her story — but at the time, it was a revelation. Stillness and stillness and stillness. What a dream to have! Would that I could find such, yes? Even now, I feel that the lucidity in my words is due only to my recounting of a conversation I actually had, words anchored to moments in time that I pull out one right after the other and lay in a pretty row.
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 <!-- Warmth discusses art with EoE -->