After that, we went to some event. Another alcohol-fueled party. Another awkward night. Another drive back home and then the rest of our stay. It went less than stellar, and we broke up the day I returned home. It had been a long time coming, not least of which because, without telling me, he’d been dating Jill for months beforehand.
Shortly after I started to realize just how ill-suited I was to music education, I went through a change of identity online. While before I had gone by the name ‘Ranna’, cribbed from Garth Nix’s excellent Old Kingdom series, I now began to go by the name Makyo, from a zen Buddhist term which bears a similar meaning. Something about just how focused many of the general teacher education classes were on things other than education filled me with a sense that I might not actually be in any way helping students, but simply standing in their way. I was makyō. I was satan.
I, at one point, was overtaken by the need to tell my story through the frame of a conversation with an ally. I described them — or perhaps they described themselves; the boundary between framing device and reality blurs — as “an ally, not a friend.” Towards the end of the project, we had a ‘conversation’ wherein I attempt to describe their inverse. Their response: “Not your enemy, but your adversary.” \parencite[25]{ally-making-of}
+I know, for instance, that my conversations with my husband around transition were many and scattered. We would chat over dinner, or we would talk on that horrifyingly yellow couch that he’d inherited about the fact that I was feeling strange about all these different aspects of identity. But you know what I remember? I remember sitting on that couch and talking in well-formed sentences, in paragraphs and essays, about why it was that I felt like the body I had and the body I \emph{had} overlapped incompletely, or I remember sitting on one of the dining table chairs turned to face the living room in a skirt I had made for myself, explaining to him that I felt like a part of me died when Margaras did.
+These were almost certainly conversations. They were full of filled pauses and the backtracking failures of speech that come with just plain chatting, but that’s not what I remember. I remember discourses and speeches and prayers.
The Book of Job remembers it through just the discourses. It remembers entire conversations, entire histories of friendship, through the lens of those two weeks Job spent in the cold firepit, covered with ashes and sores. It remembers them all through discourses and speeches and prayers. ↩
+The Book of Job remembers it through just the discourses. It remembers entire conversations, entire histories of friendship, through the lens of those two weeks Job spent in the cold firepit, covered with ashes and sores. It remembers them all through discourses and speeches and prayers. +Perhaps strangest of all, though, it remembers them disjoint and out of order.
+Edward L. Greenstein discusses the transpositions, interpositions, and interpolations that go into the book of Job. Take, for instance, Job’s first speech. ((end with vision such that Eliphaz can reference it, despite no one else mentioning that.)) ↩