update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/motes/006.md

@@ -28,25 +28,35 @@ Her mother had picked her sobbing daughter up from school, and after much cajoli
 
 A Motes who looks like she has stepped straight out of a kindergarten classroom and into the world — a world with a lower age limit, a world where one cannot upload before one turns eighteen — is a Motes who is going to draw attention. A Motes who acts five, or seven, or twelve is a Motes who is going to inspire big feelings. She is going to inspire feelings of confusion, of alarm, of anger.
 
-She is going to be a Motes who gets kicked from sims, who gets barred from entry. She is going to be a Motes who gets her tail stepped on, she is going to get hip-bumped out of the way, and ever they will promise it is an accident, and many times they will even be correct.
+She is going to be a Motes who gets kicked from sims, who gets barred from entry. She is going to be a Motes who gets her tail stepped on, she is going to get hip-bumped out of the way, and ever they will promise it is an accident, and many times they will even be telling the truth.
 
 She will be a Motes who gets sneered at. She will be scolded for some vague infraction, impropriety, some sin against God, against man, against the sanctity of the System. Or perhaps she will be a Motes who is studiously ignored. She will be the one others cross the street to avoid, the one others stay away from lest they be tainted with transgression by association.
 
-She is also going to be a Motes who inspires feelings of protection, of care, of *joie de vivre.* She is going to be one who is going to show the hedonism in play, one whose *raison d'être* is to have fun, and inspire in others a sense of compersion. She is going to be a Motes who makes one want to play in turn. She is going to be the one you want to hold in your lap, the one you want to call adorable, the one you want to hold close and protect from pain.
+She is also going to be a Motes who inspires feelings of protection, of care, of *joie de vivre.* She is going to be one who is going to show the hedonism in play, one whose *raison d'être* is to have fun, and inspire in others a sense of compersion for that fun. She is going to be a Motes who makes one want to play in turn. She is going to be the one you want to hold in your lap, the one you want to call adorable, the one you want to hold close and protect from pain.
+
+-----
+
+Sometime in the late 2100s, Motes was invited to a weird hyperformal event, one of Rye's book releases. She and her cocladists, her friends, all grumbled about it for their own reasons. It was all well and good to dress up in a skirt, but a dress? Fuck that. 
+
+Warmth dressed in its best mixture of clothes, something that shifted slowly over time between masculine and feminine, and yet those in attendance addressed em as almost exclusively ‘she’, and partway through, they pulled Motes aside to have a little grumbly bitch session. The bitch session quickly turned into into an emotional wave, a tide rolling inexorably in, and Motes burst into tears. She had dressed up in a fine black dress, hip-hugging and chic, and it was making her absolutely miserable.
+
+As Warmth and her partner, Hold My Name, comforted her, four or five Warmths surrounding her while Hold My Name brushed her hair, the three of them got to talking about identity and the ways in which appearance and social situations ground up against that. Warmth wanted– no, needed that recognition of fluidity that night.
+
+Motes increasingly needed out of this strict adherence to form.
 
 -----
 
 The inflection point came when she, the Motes who had been forked not three years prior, the Motes who was still a human who looked much like A Finger Pointing, her immediate down-tree, sat in a paint tray while painting a stage-wide sunset on a scrim.
 
-There she was, kneeling carefully on the stage and twisting around to see the red splotch ground into the seat of her overalls, and laughing. She laughed as she recognized the mess she had made — one big butt-print on the matte black of the stage — and she laughed at the way the paint had very clearly started to seep into the denim of her overalls. She laughed as memories flooded into her mind, of red paint on corduroy, of Miss Willard's snippy admonition, of her mom's patient reassurances. She laughed and, rather than wave away the mess that she had made on her overalls, she lay down on her front and summoned up a smaller paintbrush instead of the roller she had been using, loaded it up with paint, and started filling in the awkward splotch of paint on the stage into the body of some critter, round and soft. She took a break from her sunset and instead painted a fat, cartoonish skunk all in red.
+There she was, kneeling carefully on the stage and twisting around to see the red splotch ground into the seat of her sturdy work overalls, and laughing. She laughed as she recognized the mess she had made — one big butt-print on the matte black of the stage — and she laughed at the way the paint had very clearly started to seep into the denim of her overalls. She laughed as memories flooded into her mind, of red paint on corduroy, of Miss Willard's snippy admonition, of her mom's patient reassurances. She laughed and, rather than wave away the mess that she had made on her overalls, she lay down on her front and summoned up a smaller paintbrush instead of the roller she had been using, loaded it up with paint, and started filling in the awkward splotch of paint on the stage into the body of some critter, round and soft. She took a break from her sunset and instead painted a fat, cartoonish skunk all in red.
 
-By the time That It Might Give, the play's director, found her, she had added an idealized field of grass and dandelions, had painted in a frolicking fennec fox in blue, and still lay on her front, the seat of her pants colored in red from the paint she had sat in.
+By the time That It Might Give The World Orders, the play's director, found her, she had added an idealized field of grass and dandelions, had painted in a frolicking fennec fox in blue, and still lay on her front, the seat of her pants colored in red from the paint she had sat in.
 
-Rather than admonish her like Miss Willard of past, That It Might Give The World Orders had stood in silence for a long minute, looking down at her cocladist laying down and painting with a sheepish grin on her face, and then laughed. She laughed, leaned down, and ruffled Motes's hair and then sat with her, doodling bumblebees on the stage's surface, floating up above skunk and fennec, above grass and dandelions.
+Rather than admonish her like Miss Willard of past, That It Might Give had stood in silence for a long minute, looking down at her cocladist laying down and painting with a sheepish grin on her face, and then laughed. She laughed, leaned down, and ruffled Motes's hair and then sat with her, doodling bumblebees on the stage's surface, floating up above skunk and fennec, above grass and dandelions, and sharing in memories.
 
 -----
 
-The process of making friends when one is a kid on a System where everyone is old and getting older is, it turns out, not the same as making friends when one is also old and getting older. It is an act of making two sets of friends in two different ways.
+The process of making friends when one is a kid on a System where everyone is old and getting older is, it turns out, not the same as making friends when one is *just* old and getting older. It is an act of making two sets of friends in two different ways.
 
 Adults feel around the edges of friendship carefully. They ask questions, they get to know each other first. They talk. They chat. They watch and observe before they decide — even if subconsciously — that they might want to be friends with their interlocutor.
 
@@ -66,7 +76,7 @@ Motes leaned hard into that memory. She leaned into the laughter and joy of pain
 
 It was not always a kid thing. She aged down her appearance, sure, falling into a comfortable vision of a twenty-something, but it was not just appearance. It was the way she acted. It was owning of playfulness as a form of hedonism, much as the rest of the fifth stanza owned hedonism as a core part of their identity.
 
-She owned playfulness because life is play. She owned it because it was so easy to forget the role that play plays in one's life, with its carefully delineated fun times that one fits in around work and sleep and obligations.. Life is play, and over time, that Motes became play.
+She owned playfulness because life is play. She owned it because it was so easy to forget the role that play plays in one's life, with its carefully delineated fun times that one fits in around work and sleep and obligations. Life is play, and over time, Motes *became* play.
 
 It changed the way that her cocladists and friends treated her. They started ruffling her hair, trying to get her excited. They started playing with her in the auditorium, hiding to jump out and startle her or running up to tap her on the shoulder and shout "You are it!" before running off to the dressing rooms to change for their role. They started doing all of the good things that one does with kids and none of the bad things. After all, if they needed Serious Motes, they could still talk to her like the fifty year old woman that she was, right?
 
@@ -76,9 +86,9 @@ She liked that.
 
 Slow Hours, Motes's big sister, had once had it said about her by Deny All Beginnings, town crier to her town scryer, "It seems so often to me that you have the criss-cross pattern of a schoolyard tool imprinted on your face, no doubt hurled at at you by a god." She explained this to Motes that there was some contemporary interpretation of the Greek god Apollo hurling a dodgeball at the innocent to bless them with the gift of prophecy.
 
-And she had indeed become the prophet of the clade, the one checkered with predictions and who bore the heady scent of omens. She was the Delphic oracle to so many other prognosticators. She would get this dreamy, distant smile on her face and then she would speak. She would say, "I will tell you two truths and one lie about the future" and then she would say unnerving things that will almost certainly come to pass. Yes, they make take years to do so, but the was uncanny in her accuracy.
+And she had indeed become the prophet of the clade, the one checkered with predictions and who bore the heady scent of omens. She was the Delphic oracle to so many other prognosticators. She would get this dreamy, distant smile on her face and then she would speak. She would say, "I will tell you two truths and one lie about the future" and then she would say unnerving things that would almost certainly come to pass. Yes, they make take years to do so, but she was uncanny in her accuracy.
 
-So when Motes came to her, to the crowd of other crew, who always seemed to tolerate Slow Hours better than the cast, came to her and threw herself dramatically across her cocladist's lap, requesting some brushings to get the paint flecks out of her tail while she thought about how to say what she needed to say.
+So Motes came to her, to the crowd of other crew, who always seemed to tolerate Slow Hours better than the cast, came to her and threw herself dramatically across her cocladist's lap, requesting some brushings to get the paint flecks out of her tail while she thought about how to say what she needed to say.
 
 "Slow Hours, I made a friend," she said, relying on the comparatively formal name as opposed to Slow — and she was the only one Slow Hours would accept that name from — or Slowers to convey a bit of the gravity of the question.
 
@@ -96,7 +106,7 @@ Slow Hours nodded. "I sense a 'but', Speck."
 
 She nodded, laughing.
 
-"One or two have gotten big feelings for me, but most get it. We negotiate boundaries and move on with our lives, though. There are so many people here! It is not a big deal if someone says no that early on." Motes laughed, adding, "Once, one of them showed up here looking for me, and A Finger Pointing just about tore him in half."
+"One or two have gotten big feelings for me, but most get it. We negotiate boundaries and move on with our lives. There are so many people here! It is not a big deal if someone says no that early on." Motes laughed, adding, "Once, one of them showed up here looking for me, and A Finger Pointing just about tore them in half."
 
 Slow Hours smiled, but said gently, "You are stalling, my dear."
 
@@ -104,13 +114,13 @@ She groaned and buried her face against her cocladist's shoulder. "I knooow. Any
 
 "And you think you might like to follow up on that?"
 
-"They are just into all sorts of things I am. They paint — people, mostly, and some animals — and like a lot of the same music, and also...also are into the whole little thing. They suggested we forget the sex part and maybe do a regular sort of get-together thing." She hesitated before adding, far more bashfully, "You know. As kids."
+"They are just into all sorts of things I am. They paint — people, mostly, and some animals — and like a lot of the same music, and also...also are into the whole little thing. They suggested we forget the sex part and maybe do a regular sort of get-together." She hesitated before adding, far more bashfully, "You know. As kids."
 
 "Have you told A Finger Pointing about them?"
 
 She shook her head. "That was part of what I wanted to talk to you about."
 
-Slow Hours asked her several questions. She asked about the person. She asked about the day before. She asked about the morning after. She asked about Beholden and Unbidden and the crowd around her. She asked about how drunk she had been, how high. She asked like there was some thread being tugged, whether by her fingers or by Motes's or Apollo himself. No one ever asked, not even Slow Hours, and she never said, lest the whole thing come tumbling down.
+Slow Hours asked her several questions. She asked about the person. She asked about the day before. She asked about the morning after. She asked about Beholden and Unbidden and the crowd around her. She asked about how drunk she had been, how high. She asked like there was some thread being tugged, whether by her fingers or by Motes's or Apollo himself. No one ever asked how this worked, not even Slow Hours — *especially* not Slow Hours — lest the whole thing come tumbling down.
 
 "Speck," she said, interrupting Motes at one point. "Here are two truths and a lie."
 
@@ -118,9 +128,9 @@ Motes frowned.
 
 "One: they are a fucking creep."
 
-There was a moment's silence before she giggled nervously. The flow of prophecy had a rhythm, though, and so she remained silent to let Slow Hours continue.
+There was a moment's silence before she giggled nervously, a fawning laugh. The flow of prophecy had a rhythm, though, and so she remained silent to let Slow Hours continue.
 
-"Two: you are lonely. You have us, yes. You have your stanza and the rest of the troupe. You have your family and your work, but what you do not have are the types of friends you describe. You are friendly with everyone here, everyone is your friend, but you do not *have* friends in this way."
+"Two: you are lonely. You have us, yes. You have your stanza and the rest of the troupe. You have your family and your work, but what you do not have are the types of friends you describe. You are friendly with everyone here, everyone is your friend, but you do not *have* many friends in this way."
 
 Still wrong-footed, Motes leaned away from her cocladist. "And the third?"
 
@@ -128,7 +138,7 @@ Still wrong-footed, Motes leaned away from her cocladist. "And the third?"
 
 "'Yours' as in the clade's?"
 
-After a moment, Slow Hours spoke again, the edge of prophecy letting off of her throat. "There are as many reasons to keep someone for yourself as there are ways to do so. The whole of the fifth stanza — and, to a lesser extent, the whole of Au Lieu de Rêve — has closed around you. Not tight, of course, we are not keeping you trapped and hidden away, but we are all intensely, intensely protective of you. We have all endeavored to make your life here the best that it can be, as you have invited us to do. This was part of our conversations going all the way back, was it not? That you enjoyed leaning into being cared for, and we enjoyed having someone to collectively care for? We do not like creeps around our Motes, and so we see creeps everywhere."
+After a moment, Slow Hours spoke again, the knife-edge of prophecy letting off of her throat. "There are as many reasons to keep someone for yourself as there are ways to do so. The whole of the fifth stanza — and, to a lesser extent, the whole of Au Lieu de Rêve — has closed around you. Not tight, of course, we are not keeping you trapped and hidden away, but we are all intensely, intensely protective of you. We have all endeavored to make your life here the best that it can be, as you have invited us to do. This was part of our conversations going all the way back, was it not? That you enjoyed leaning into being cared for, and we enjoyed having someone to collectively care for? We do not like creeps around our Motes, and so we see creeps everywhere."
 
 Once Motes saw what she was saying, saw through the everblue tint of prophecy and her own little game of two truths and a lie, the skunk's shoulders relaxed and she slumped against her, sniffling.
 
@@ -136,7 +146,7 @@ Once Motes saw what she was saying, saw through the everblue tint of prophecy an
 
 Motes understood after some days of consideration that it was not her prophecy. It was theirs. It was Slow Hours's and A Finger Pointing's and Beholden's and Unbidden's and the whole rest of Au Lieu Du Rêve's.
 
-She was still good friends with that person years later. That person and so many more.
+She was still good friends with that person, that kid who was not a creep, never had been a creep, years later. That person and so many more.
 
 -----
 
@@ -144,15 +154,15 @@ Motes should not, she is told, do many things.
 
 She should not look too much like a child. She should not look like a kid because there are those with paraphilias surrounding children, and this would be both potentially harmful to her, as well as to the optics of the Ode clade as a whole.
 
-She should not act too much like a child. She should not act like a kid because, while a focus on play is all well and good, a sense of maturity will keep her grounded in the world around her, as well as potentially be harmful to the optics of the Ode clade as a whole.
+She should not act too much like a child. She should not act like a kid because, while a focus on play is all well and good, a sense of maturity would keep her grounded in the world around her where leaning into childhood would not, and would potentially be harmful to the optics of the Ode clade as a whole.
 
-She should not treat her stanza as family. She should not treat her down-tree as her mother, nor A Finger Pointing's partner, Beholden, as a parent, nor Slow Hours and Time Rushes as her sisters, as the rest of the fifth stanza as siblings throughout, because family dynamics within one extended definition of a singular person create more room for potentially unhealthy modes of interaction, just as might intraclade romantic relationships, as well as potentially be harmful to the optics of the Ode clade as a whole.
+She should not treat her stanza as family. She should not treat her down-tree as her mother, nor A Finger Pointing's partner, Beholden, as a parent, nor Slow Hours and Time Rushes as her sisters, as the rest of the fifth stanza as siblings throughout, because family dynamics within one extended definition of a singular person create more room for potentially unhealthy modes of interaction, just as might intraclade romantic relationships, and this might also potentially be harmful to the optics of the Ode clade as a whole.
 
 Motes should not, she is told, do many things, and yet she does them anyway. She is careful. She is gradual. She has allies.
 
 She is told these things via hints and intimations. She is told these things through A Finger Pointing and Slow Hours and countless others.
 
-She is told gently. She is told to be careful. She is told out of a sense of protectiveness. She is told because, regardless of the implications of these warnings, the fifth stanza really does love her — they tell her and she believes — and she is told because even she can see many ways that there are plenty and sufficient reasons that someone looking young in a world with a lower bound on age would be viewed with disdain, and yet she may not see all of those ways.
+She is told gently. She is told to be careful. She is told out of a sense of protectiveness. She is told because, regardless of the implications of these warnings, the fifth stanza really does love her — they tell her and she believes — and she is told because even she can see many ways that there are plenty and sufficient reasons that someone looking young in a world with a lower bound on age would be viewed with disdain, and yet she may not see *all* of those ways.
 
 -----
 
@@ -162,11 +172,11 @@ Above all else, Motes enjoyed piggyback rides.
 
 But always, Motes played.
 
-She played because play was transgressive for one such as her, was it not? Oh, there were games sys-side. Within her own clade was a game designer and curator — and they often leaned on Motes for input and play-testing — and so of course play was okay, but as soon as one presents oneself as she did, as a child, then suddenly that play becomes something that works to define that very part of her. It was transgressive because when Motes played, it cast the play that every adult around her engaged with as either defined by or contrasted against her very presence.
+She played because play was transgressive for one such as her, was it not? Oh, there were games sys-side. Within her own clade was a game designer and curator, What Gifts — and they often leaned on Motes for input and play-testing — and so of course play was okay, but as soon as one presents oneself as she did, as a child, then suddenly that play becomes something that works to define that very part of her. It was transgressive because when Motes played, it cast the play that every adult around her engaged with as either defined by or contrasted against her very presence.
 
 But she played in that transgression. She used it to push and press against those definitions and boundaries. She played as a twenty-something, letting her cocladists and coworkers ruffle her hair to rile her up or jump from behind a curtain to scare her.
 
-She played as a child — even if, at first, it was only within the confines of home, and then within the apartment building, and then within the troupe, before she ever did so in public.
+She played as a child — even if, at first, it was only within the confines of home, and then within the stanza's neighborhood, and then within the troupe, before she ever did so in public.
 
 She played in that familial identity, of A Finger Pointing as 'ma' and Beholden as 'Bee' and Slow Hours as Sis Hours — even if, at first, it was only within the confines of home; even if, at first, it engendered awkward and cautious feelings.
 
@@ -184,6 +194,6 @@ Motes dreamed.
 
 She dreamed and dreamed and dreamed, her mind wandering over her past, there in the dark, there alone, after A Finger Pointing left, there in her extra soft bed with her overstuffed duvet and all of her stuffed animals.
 
-At some point, minutes or days or hours later, she slept and dreamed true. She dreamed that she was sitting in a field of well-tended grass that was nonetheless dotted liberally with dandelions, speckled with bumblebees. She dreamed that she had all the wonder of a child and that the day was sunny and lovely and the grass was inviting her to roll around in it, and just above, just in the distance, a hyperblack rectangle, a hole in the world that hungrily devoured all of the light that it could lingered, and it was neither good nor bad, and even with its insatiable hunger, the day was sunny and lovely and the grass was inviting her to roll around in it.
+At some point, hours or days or minutes later, she slept and dreamed true. She dreamed that she was sitting in a field of well-tended grass that was nonetheless dotted liberally with dandelions, speckled with bumblebees. She dreamed that she had all the wonder of a child and that the day was sunny and lovely and the grass was inviting her to roll around in it, and just above, just in the distance, a hyperblack rectangle, a hole in the world that hungrily devoured all of the light that it could, lingered, and it was neither good nor bad, and even with its insatiable hunger, the day was sunny and lovely and the grass was inviting her to roll around in it.
 
 And then she awoke.