That is how time’s inevitable arrow works, after all, is it not? There was a time when Motes was not, when she had not yet existed, and then there was a point at which she began, and from then on, she existed. Her presence was in the world, and it was undeniable. There were witnesses. There were knock-on effects. She undeniably was.
And so, there was a time at which she did not play, did not surround herself with play, did not define herself by it, and then there was a point at which she began to play. It was a starting point. It was an inflection point, at which she collided with the idea of play and her trajectory was changed.
And yet, even before that, before Motes, before the System, before getting lost, Michelle had played, had she not? She had been a kid, yes? The Michelle, even before getting her implants and becoming Sasha, had been five, had been six and seven and eight.
+Michelle played as well. She painted, too, back then.
Roly-poly Michelle Hadje, 263 years ago, sitting in kindergarten, shitty paintbrush in her hand, shitty tempera paint in a dish set before a shitty piece of off-white construction paper. She sat their in her silly little corduroy pants and silly little flower-print blouse, a silly little smile on her face, painting a robin in primary red and deep-dark black.
Silly, roly-poly Michelle Hadje in her dirt-brown corduroys splotched with a patch of red from having sat down directly in a puddle of paint. It was not a drip so easily wiped away but well and truly ground into the ridged fabric of her trousers.
@@ -24,6 +25,21 @@And Michelle cried. She cried because — people-pleaser her — she wanted nothing other than to be a good girl. She wanted her teacher to like her. She wanted her mother to love her. She wanted to be good and to never risk that love, and here she was, being told that she had done wrong, that her mother would be upset!
It was all so silly! She was a kid! She was five and a half! Of course she was going to get messy. Of course there would be paint on her hands, and so why should there not also be paint on her pants? She was a kid and she was clumsy and a mess like that was just a part of her life.
Her mother had picked her sobbing daughter up from school, and after much cajoling, much reassuring her that she would not abandon her, would not leave her by the side of the road to be picked up by…who exactly? She reassured her that the paint stain was fine, and that she would have a chat with Miss Willard. When your daughter’s neurodivergence presents itself in anxiety, perhaps you get used to reassuring her that you love her, and when you are mother, perhaps you never tire of doing so.
+A Motes who looks like she has stepped straight out of a kindergarten classroom and into the world — a world with a lower age limit, a world where one cannot upload before one turns eighteen — is a Motes who is going to draw attention. A Motes who acts five, or seven, or twelve is a Motes who is going to inspire big feelings. She is going to inspire feelings of confusion, of alarm, of anger.
+She is going to be a Motes who gets kicked from sims, who gets barred from entry. She is going to be a Motes who gets her tail stepped on, she is going to get hip-bumped out of the way, and ever they will promise it is an accident, and many times they will even be correct.
+She will be a Motes who gets sneered at. She will be scolded for some vague infraction, impropriety, some sin against God, against man, against the sanctity of the System. Or perhaps she will be a Motes who is studiously ignored. She will be the one others cross the street to avoid, the one others stay away from lest they be tainted with transgression by association.
+She is also going to be a Motes who inspires feelings of protection, of care, of joie de vivre. She is going to be one who is going to show the hedonism in play, one whose raison d’être is to have fun, and inspire in others a sense of compersion. She is going to be a Motes who makes one want to play in turn. She is going to be the one you want to hold in your lap, the one you want to call adorable, the one you want to hold close and protect from pain.
+The inflection point came when she, the Motes who had been forked not three years prior, the Motes who was still a human who looked much like A Finger Pointing, her immediate down-tree, sat in a paint tray while painting a stage-wide sunset on a scrim.
+There she was, kneeling carefully on the stage and twisting around to see the red splotch ground into the seat of her overalls, and laughing. She laughed as she recognized the mess she had made — one big butt-print on the matte black of the stage — and she laughed at the way the paint had very clearly started to seep into the denim of her overalls. She laughed as memories flooded into her mind, of red paint on corduroy, of Miss Willard’s snippy admonition, of her mom’s patient reassurances. She laughed and, rather than wave away the mess that she had made on her overalls, she lay down on her front and summoned up a smaller paintbrush instead of the roller she had been using, loaded it up with paint, and started filling in the awkward splotch of paint on the stage into the body of some critter, round and soft. She took a break from her sunset and instead painted a fat, cartoonish skunk all in red.
+By the time That It Might Give, the play’s director, found her, she had added an idealized field of grass and dandelions, had painted in a frolicking fennec fox in blue, and still lay on her front, the seat of her pants colored in red from the paint she had sat in.
+Rather than admonish her like Miss Willard of past, That It Might Give The World Orders had stood in silence for a long minute, looking down at her cocladist laying down and painting with a sheepish grin on her face, and then laughed. She laughed, leaned down, and ruffled Motes’s hair and then sat with her, doodling bumblebees on the stage’s surface, floating up above skunk and fennec, above grass and dandelions.
+The process of making friends when one is a kid on a System where everyone is old and getting older is, it turns out, not the same as making friends when one is also old and getting older. It is an act of making two sets of friends in two different ways.
+Adults feel around the edges of friendship carefully. They ask questions, they get to know each other first. They talk. They chat. They watch and observe before they decide — even if subconsciously — that they might want to be friends with their interlocutor.
+Kids fall into friendship easily. They need one thing to connect on, and then they simply become friends.
+They are two different ways of moving in the world, and yet they end in the same goal: friendship. A friend is a friend is a friend.