update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/motes/008.html

@@ -73,7 +73,7 @@
 <p>Dry Grass nodded.</p>
 <p>&ldquo;So it took me a lot of getting used to. Even boss was a little caught off guard by that. I shied away from her for a bit when she started started, I am sorry to say. &lsquo;Bee&rsquo; is a compromise that felt on the edge of comfort at the time, though now it feels really good when she calls me that. She calls you &lsquo;Ma 2.0&rsquo;, did you know that?&rdquo;</p>
 <p>Dry Grass blinked, then burst out in laughter, laughing until once more the tears flowed down her cheeks, holding herself still on her swing with feet planted firmly on the ground.</p>
-<p>Beholden waited in silence. She knew well the mechanics of a hysterical laugh-cry, and while her and Dry Grass&rsquo;s relationship did not include a whole lot of hugging, she still nudged herself to the side far enough to rub at her cocladist&rsquo;s shoulder until the tears once more slowed and she was once more able to breathe but for a few few aftershocks of chuckling.</p>
+<p>Beholden waited in silence. She knew well the mechanics of a hysterical laugh-cry — she had at one point recorded A Finger Pointing falling into such and chopped it into little slivers of half-recognizable samples and haunted an entire album with it, so beautiful had she found it — and while her and Dry Grass&rsquo;s relationship did not include a whole lot of hugging, she still nudged herself to the side far enough to rub at her cocladist&rsquo;s shoulder until the tears once more slowed and she was once more able to breathe but for a few few aftershocks of chuckling.</p>
 <p>&ldquo;Sorry, Beholden,&rdquo; Dry Grass said, once she was able. &ldquo;I am a little fucked up still, I think.&rdquo;</p>
 <p>She laughed. &ldquo;I mean, this is a pretty fucked situation, my dear. I would be surprised if you were not.&rdquo;</p>
 <p>They both settled into swinging in silence once more, just a gentle rocking back and forth to calm down and enjoy time away from so much stress before it would doubtless ramp up once more when Waking World was set to visit after lunch.</p>
@@ -91,7 +91,7 @@
 <p>Lunch was, despite being a sauce served over rice, all the same dry and ashen in Beholden&rsquo;s mouth as she struggled with so many swirling feelings, so many spiraling thoughts around what had happened.</p>
 <p>Still, she managed to clean her plate, managed to straighten herself up for the meeting with Waking World, managed to only yell at him a little bit. She managed as best she could as they did their best to learn what paths forward they had.</p>
 <p>She tamped down her emotions throughout, press-fit them into place within her so that they would not spill over into the world around her, bottled them up, wrote a label on the jar, and set it on a shelf high in her mind to deal with later, right next to all of the other jars about which she had promised the same.</p>
-<p>She had to, at least for now, at least for the time being. She would need to reckon with the person that she had built herself up into. She would need to deal with all of the compromises that she had made in order to be Beholden.</p>
+<p>She had to, at least for now, at least for the time being. She would need to reckon with the person that she had built herself up into. She would need to deal with all of the compromises that she had made in order to be Beholden. She was Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps, sound and music director for the troupe. She was lead sound tech. This was the cost of engaging so closely with what had once been her dearest friend&rsquo;s specialty. This was the price she paid for being Au Lieu Du Rêve&rsquo;s very own AwDae. It was her fragility, and the only way she knew to reinforce herself was through setting such emotions aside. She would need to confront that, but not just yet, not with so much before her.</p>
 <p>And so, when A Finger Pointing stood, wobbled, and requested that she take her home, Beholden had been immediately ready to stand up and gently guide her partner from the library and back to the neighborhood. She let her partner hold onto her to the extent that she was comfortable, rather than the other way around, trusting that she would take only what touch she needed lest she get yet more overwhelmed.</p>
 <p>She knew well by now the ways in which A Finger Pointing had changed over the years, about how the crash had affected her. </p>
 <p>She knew well because she had seen the exhaustion or fear or slackness in her partner&rsquo;s expression when the dissociation would crawl over her, had heard how she would turn down her sensorium almost all the way just to survive. </p>
@@ -101,9 +101,6 @@
 <p>Once A Finger Pointing was settled on the couch and Motes had been checked on, once the message had been sent to Hammered Silver and they had eaten and settled down on the couch for the night, only then, did Beholden very carefully open the jarred emotions from earlier, carefully withdrawing them one by one and laying them out before herself in her mind. She did not touch them. She used tweezers or tongs or perhaps chopsticks to lift them free, nudge them to lay flat that she might read deeper into them.</p>
 <p>And then, exhausted by day, by the last few days, by worry over her Dot, her <em>dóttir</em>, by worry over her boss — &ldquo;not your boss&rdquo; the common refrain — she carefully replaced all of those emotions, still largely unprocessed, into their container and once more sealed it tight. There had been precious little processing tonight.</p>
 <p>Perhaps some day she might.</p>
-<p>(( Caring for A Finger Pointing ))<br />
-(((( Pointillist sighs wistfully. &ldquo;She has recorded me doing all sorts of things in my day-to-day as well. There is a recording of my heartfelt laughter turning to dire sobbing after a really rough day. She chopped it into little slivers of half-recognizable samples and haunted an entire album with it like the world&rsquo;s longest &ldquo;Chihuahua or Muffin&rdquo; slideshow.&rdquo; ))))</p>
-<p>(( The origin of struggling with emotions, tamping down grief in order to work with sound, ever AwDae&rsquo;s thing ))</p>
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                 <p>Page generated on 2024-01-23</p>