I don’t have it saved anywhere, but our final communication was a letter and a gift. I sent her a book — a comic, really, a limited edition of Rruffurr — along with a hand-written note apologizing for what I had done, though at that point I wasn’t clear just which of these wobbles of our dynamic had been the true cause of her silence.
Her response was a request for no contact moving forward.
((God comes out of the cloud and silences everyone))
+((Clash of interested vs disinterested
++O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell
+
+and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.
+But if I worship You for Your Own sake,
+grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.\parencite[35]{rabia}
+I want to put out the fires of Hell, and burn down the rewards of Paradise. They block the way to Allah. I do not want to worship from fear of punishment or for the promise of reward, but simply for the love of Allah. \parencite{rabia2} +))
+
Up until that point, my interaction with gender had been the tentative pressing against a bruise. It hurt, yes, but one cannot help but press on bruises, yes? There it is, blue and purple, an angry discoloration that aches at the slightest touch, and yet you cannot stop touching it, defining the edges of that ache with an apophatic walk of the fingertips.
This exploration began to stutter as doubt began dart around and in between the wandering feet of curiosity, tripping it up and making it hold still so that it didn’t fall flat on its face.
@@ -52,10 +61,10 @@The pendulum would swing, and I would promise myself that I could simply ignore that. Bodies are bodies, and sometimes they are stupid. Perhaps I could just not engage with mine whenever I began to feel bad, and focus my energy on something else.
The friendship had crashed the ground and shattered, and then the shards began to crumble, themselves. Now, even my engagement with gender began to crumble, or at least the surface began to flake away.
((Job’s response, is but dust))
+((God comes out of the cloud and silences everyone))