update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/idumea/002.html

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                 <h1>Zk | 002</h1>
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-                <h2 id="end-of-endings-2403rye-2409">End Of Endings — 2403<br>×<br>Rye — 2409</h2>
-<p>The Woman decided to go walking one day. Perhaps she was driven by restlessness. She had an errand to run, sure, but this day she decided to go out rather than perform this task at home. Perhaps she was bored! I do not know. </p>
+                <p>The Woman decided to go walking one day. Perhaps she was driven by restlessness. She had an errand to run, sure, but this day she decided to go out walking rather than perform this task at home or simply blip into being at her destination. Perhaps she was bored! I do not know. </p>
 <p>Either way, she was feeling good and she was feeling stable and she was feeling feline, so she found herself a nice set of slacks to wear over her legs, ones that looped up over the base of her tail in such a way that the same would be just as possible with a skunk&rsquo;s tail, and yet which would not fall down for those moments when she did not have a tail. </p>
 <p>She found herself a nice shirt that felt good on the fur and which would not look too weird if she poofed out into a skunk. It was not her favorite shirt, I am sure, otherwise maybe she would wear it every day, but it was good enough. It had the word &lsquo;fiend&rsquo; scribbled across it in angular, glitchy graffiti, and The Woman is absolutely allowed to feel like a fiend some days.</p>
 <p>Thus clothed, The Woman stood for a while in front of the mirror and admired herself. She felt good. She felt good, reader! It was not often that she felt more than just okay. Because even with all that I wrote about before, her life was not bad. It was an okay life. She liked this life in her own way. Her thoughts on unbecoming were not thoughts on suicide, I do not think.</p>
@@ -92,9 +91,20 @@
 <p>The Woman preened. This, you see, is more than just a brushing out of imperfections, but a shift in attitude. When The Woman preened — when her whole clade preened, even! — she would sit up a little straighter with a subtle shimmy, lift her snout, close her eyes, bristle her whiskers, and smile a smile that was just south of smug. It is <em>very</em> cute, reader, I can assure you of that.</p>
 <p>They fell then into comfortable chatter over just the small things: the coffee, the weather, the chairs and how they were <em>almost</em> comfortable, but not quite. They fell into warmth and companionship, and all the while, the woman set that fleeting thought she had had just off to the side, where she could keep track of it without it distracting.</p>
 <p>Perhaps this unbecoming that her mind circled around was simply the utmost in stillness.</p>
+<hr />
+<p>The Woman rode the high of lovely friendship for days after that coffee date. For nearly a week, she reveled in the sense of camaraderie and coexistence. How lucky she was! How lucky that she had the chance to exist in the same universe as Her Friend! How lucky, how lucky.</p>
+<p>Whenever The Woman felt this way, she would wander around the house and clean. She would take on extra cooking duties and make extra desserts for her cocladists and their friends. She would stay in one form for far longer than was her usual, and remained now a panther. She would go for walks around the field, treating the house itself as a signpost at the center of widening circles. She would imagine that those circles might some day spread out across the entire world, never mind the varied infinities housed within the field itself. It was a thing to which she could give herself as she asked her high-minded questions: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?</p>
+<p>These words of Rilke&rsquo;s would dance unblushing through her mind, linking arms on one side with the words of Dickinson which ever twined around those of her clade — <em>If I should die, And you should live, And time should gurgle on, And morn should beam, And noon should burn, As it has usual done&hellip;</em> — and on the other with the lingering lines of the Ode that made up the names of her clade. &ldquo;I remember the rattle of dry grass,&rdquo; she would explain to the bees as they buzzed in friendship around her ankles. &ldquo;I remember the names of all things and forget them only when I wake.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And so she would cook her meals and walk in widening circles around this primordial tower that was her home, perhaps circling around God, though she did not care one way or the other if there was that of God in everything.</p>
+<p>These were her joys to go along with the needs of ritual, of brushing her fingers along imagined <em>mezuzot</em>. To walk was her ritual, to spiral outward from her home in the warmth of sunlight and the dance of bees and the tickling of dandelions against her ankles was to cast that ritual in the light of pleasure.</p>
+<p>I have never been quite so fond of walking, myself, kind readers. There is meditation in it, I am told. I am told there is the simple pleasure of the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other-ness of it. But friends, I am tired most of the time. I am old and I am tired and my pleasure lies in stillness and quiet. I love my mochas and I love sitting down before the page with pen in paw to put to paper, and I love bathing in story.</p>
+<p>I say so often that stepping away from such a task is still writing. When I sit on the patio in front of our little bundle of townhouses and look out at the shared lawn, or when I step — <em>stepped,</em> for it is no longer here — out to the shortgrass prairie of my cocladist, to sit beside a cairn of stones or share a meal, that is still writing! Your narrator has written these words, this story, a hundred, a thousand times within her head. That is my joy, and graphomania my compulsion.</p>
+<p>When The Woman overflows, she becomes ever more herself. She is — my attentive readers will remember this, of course — she is already too much herself, too whole, too present. This is the nature of overflowing, you see: we become so much ourselves that it begins to ache, to press at our chest from the inside. For your humble narrator, that graphomania strikes with such force that meaning falls away from my words only gibberish comes forth, or perhaps I will write the same phrase over and over and over, unable to sate my own compulsions.</p>
+<p>My astute readers will surely have picked up by now that I am riding that edge here, in these words.</p>
+<p>But, ah! This story is not about me. I am not quite overflowing yet, and The Woman most certainly is not. She is reveling in the warmth of sunlight and the dance of bees and the tickling of dandelions against her ankles and the purringly soft touch of friendship.</p>
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-                <p>Page generated on 2024-07-02</p>
+                <p>Page generated on 2024-07-13</p>
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