update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/idumea/008.md

@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ I am very nearly there, too, to the end that you doubtless know is coming. There
 
 -----
 
-We are women, much of the clade. There are some men, yes, and many who have exited such limitations as gender offers, but many of us remain women. Woman who are skunks, perhaps, or women who are cats, or women who are shamed some other thing — for is not there also joy in the furry identity with which we fell in love so many centuries ago? — but we are women still. We are so many of us still the short and fat and white and Jewish and dramatic and at-times-ebullient and at-times-depressed women that once Michelle who was Sasha embodied.
+We are women, much of the clade. There are some men, yes, and many who have exited such limitations as gender offers, but many of us remain women. Woman who are skunks, perhaps, or women who are cats, or women who are shaped some other thing — for is not there also joy in the furry identity with which we fell in love so many centuries ago? — but we are women still. We are so many of us still the short and fat and white and Jewish and dramatic and at-times-ebullient and at-times-depressed women that once Michelle who was Sasha embodied.
 
 I can still look like this! I think we all can. You know as well as I do, dear friends, that our memory is untainted by time, that years and years, and years and years and years may pass, and yet we remember so much with such clarity that it makes me wonder, sometimes, and it makes me tremble. How clearly I remember the day! How clearly I remember the day that, having made it at last to the north north north and west of Yakutsk, my friend Debarre and I sat in a waiting room–
 
@@ -20,7 +20,13 @@ My friend Debarre and I gathered every penny, and even then we still had to borr
 
 What I mean to say is that our memory is perfect, that I can still look like that scared, scared woman — a woman who was sometimes a skunk, yes, and who remembered being at times a panther, but still a woman — who first uploaded within a day of her friend Debarre–
 
-And so we were locked into that room together, that hotel room or perhaps repurposed apartment yellowed to sepia by age, drinking tea after tea after tea because we were too nervous to sleep and not allowed to eat any food until just before the procedure, when we would be offered a hearty breakfast so that we would not upload feeling hungry, to that world that did not yet have food. We sat and we drank tea and we held hands and we talked quietly with each other trying to decide who would sit and ache, locked in a hotel room or apartment, and who would sit and ache, locked in some new world of uploaded minds.
+And so we were locked into that room together, that hotel room or perhaps repurposed apartment yellowed to sepia by age, drinking tea after tea after tea because we were too nervous to sleep and not allowed to eat any food until just before the procedure, when we would be offered a hearty breakfast so that we would not upload feeling hungry, to that world that did not yet have food. We sat and we drank tea and we held hands and we talked quietly with each other trying to decide who would sit and ache, locked in a hotel room or apartment, and who would sit and ache, locked in some new world of uploaded minds. We sat and we drank tea and we begged and pleaded first for one and then the other, and then we lay down on the two single beds in the dark, facing each other, that first night, and begged and pleaded yet more until, finally, we pulled out the nightstand that sat between them and pushed the beds together so that we could once more hold hands in silence, wondering to ourselves who it was who would be the first, and then, at ten 'til midnight, we lifted the receiver on the ancient telephone...ah, but I am wandering.
+
+Ah, my dear, *dear* readers, you know that I am struggling, I will not apologize any further than I have already. I will focus, and I will tell you about shapes.
+
+What I have meant to tell you, what I have been trying to tell you and failing as waves of words wash over me, is that I remember what it was like to be that shape. I, *too,* can look like Michelle who was Sasha did. I do not choose to do so often — I have not done so in some decades — but I know that I still can, for I just now tried forking into such a shape. The Woman looked like that perhaps one third of the time, yes? 
+
+Many of those within our clade still look like her, to some extent or another, and one of those, one who came to visit me not a week after I met with The Woman, was The Blue Fairy.
 
 -----