update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/mitzvot/035.html

@@ -26,7 +26,12 @@
 <p>Ey had had no idea how to feel about her back when she was just True Name. Had ey really been so hesitant to call her a friend? Memories tattled on em, there: ey&rsquo;d shied away from the term, or qualified it every time it arose. That had only loosened up when her life was at risk, when she&rsquo;d been forced to move in with them, and ey&rsquo;d been forced in turn to acknowledge that her words, <em>I suppose it is just nice to have a friend</em>, had stuck with em more than ey&rsquo;d cared to admit. The rest of that conversation had been full of equivocations, clarifications, delineations, and all those habits of guardedness from two decades of wariness over anything that smelt of manipulation had tried to assert themselves over em once more.</p>
 <p>But no, there was something about the Ode clade that just happened to click with the Bălan clade, no matter what form or name they took, that just fell directly into friendship. It was the way they spoke, perhaps. Those complete sentences that left em uncoiling parts of emself ey hadn&rsquo;t known were coiled in the first place.</p>
 <p>Ey didn&rsquo;t know what it was that they saw in em in turn. There was the unspoken matter of the pronouns of the owner of the Name, and, as May had once whispered to em late one night, eir tendency to lean on rumination, on quietness and exactitude, that reminded her of someone she refused to name. Were they so alike, em and whoever had touched Michelle Hadje so long ago? Ey had no clue how to ask such a thing of them.</p>
-<p>All ey knew is that, </p>
+<p>All ey knew is that, as Codrin had put it, &ldquo;The Odists loved hard and they loved deep and they loved fast, and it was hard not to become intoxicated beneath all that love.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>So, what was ey to do when that of eir partner, of the one ey loved most in the world, shone through in someone else? When that of May rose to prominence in True Name&rsquo;s expression, she was not May. She wasn&rsquo;t May at all. She was of three minds, and none of them were wholly absent whenever one asserted primacy.</p>
+<p>And yet there it was, all that drew em towards May, even if it wasn&rsquo;t her, right in front of em. What was ey to do with that?</p>
+<p>That ey didn&rsquo;t know, that ey hadn&rsquo;t the language, kept em from speaking of it with True Name just yet. It wasn&rsquo;t out of any need to hide, not out of any embarrassment &mdash; though ey&rsquo;d freely admit to eir shyness &mdash; that ey kept it from her. Ey just didn&rsquo;t know how to say that, when she seemed most like May, ey was at eir most confused without turning it into a series of questions and I-don&rsquo;t-knows.</p>
+<p>The one time ey&rsquo;d brought it up with May, the idea still as yet unseasoned, she had done as she ever would, and teased em gently about &lsquo;falling in love with her&rsquo; and then settled into a series of gently probing questions, trying to tease out things that ey already knew but did not yet have the language for.</p>
+<p>It hadn&rsquo;t gone anywhere. Ey&rsquo;d eventually had to put the conversation on hold out of a combination of stress and the feeling that ey ought to keep True Name&rsquo;s discussion on her multiplicity in the face of May&rsquo;s desire for some more complete unity to emself.</p>
 <p>((&hellip;))</p>
 <p>In the most stunning display of forking ey&rsquo;d ever seen, True Name began to change.</p>
 <p>Ioan had seen eir share of Dear&rsquo;s exhibitions, not to mention those of other instance artists the fox had introduced em to along the way, and the forking involved in all of them had been perfect. They were well rehearsed dances of duplication that told a story.</p>