update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/motes/006.html

@@ -40,9 +40,35 @@
 <p>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.</p>
 <p>Kids fall into friendship easily. They need one thing to connect on, and then they simply become friends.</p>
 <p>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.</p>
+<p>Motes fell into friendship as a kid. She fell into friendship with Alexei. She fell into friendship with Who Walks The Path. She fell into friendship with so many other kids she met at this playground or at that game sim. </p>
+<p>Fell into and fell out of, yes? For kids fall out of friendship just as easily. They find a similarity and become the bestest of friends with each other and then that turns out to not be enough to maintain a friendship or it turns out that the other kid has another, bestester friend or it turns out that the other kid is actually kind of a b-word. And so Motes fell into friendship with Jonie who was a dog and then fell out of that friendship some few weeks later when Jonie who was a dog called Motes stinky one too many times and she was <em>not</em> stinky. She fell into friendship with Khadijah Bt. Faisal when she went through a rope skipping phase and then fell out of it when the phase ended and Khadijah cried and cried and cried and when Motes tried to rekindle the friendship the trust had already been broken. She fell out of relationships but never as many as she fell into and relationships lasted years or decades.</p>
+<p>She fell into and out of friendships and forgot, perhaps, how to form adult friendships, and so many people she met as Big Motes only passed through her life for a week or so.</p>
+<hr />
+<p>Motes leaned hard into that memory. She leaned into the laughter and joy of painting with her fingers and, apparently, her pants, as well as the tears of fear of being abandoned for having messed up so badly.</p>
+<p>It was not always a kid thing. She aged down her appearance, sure, falling into a comfortable vision of a twenty-something, but it was not just appearance. It was the way she acted. It was owning of playfulness as a form of hedonism, much as the rest of the fifth stanza owned hedonism as a core part of their identity.</p>
+<p>She owned playfulness because life is play. She owned it because it was so easy to forget the role that play plays in one&rsquo;s life, with its carefully delineated fun times that one fits in around work and sleep and obligations.. Life is play, and over time, that Motes became play.</p>
+<p>It changed the way that her cocladists and friends treated her. They started ruffling her hair, trying to get her excited. They started playing with her in the auditorium, hiding to jump out and startle her or running up to tap her on the shoulder and shout &ldquo;You are it!&rdquo; before running off to the dressing rooms to change for their role. They started doing all of the good things that one does with kids and none of the bad things. After all, if they needed Serious Motes, they could still talk to her like the fifty year old woman that she was, right?</p>
+<p>She liked that.</p>
+<hr />
+<p>Slow Hours, Motes&rsquo;s big sister, had once had it said about her by Deny All Beginnings, town crier to her town scryer, &ldquo;It seems so often to me that you have the criss-cross pattern of a schoolyard tool imprinted on your face, no doubt hurled at at you by a god.&rdquo; She explained this to Motes that there was some contemporary interpretation of the Greek god Apollo hurling a dodgeball at the innocent to bless them with the gift of prophecy.</p>
+<p>And she had indeed become the prophet of the clade, the one checkered with predictions and who bore the heady scent of omens. She was the Delphic oracle to so many other prognosticators. She would get this dreamy, distant smile on her face and then she would speak. She would say, &ldquo;I will tell you two truths and one lie about the future&rdquo; and then she would say unnerving things that will almost certainly come to pass. Yes, they make take years to do so, but the was uncanny in her accuracy.</p>
+<p>So when Motes came to her, to the crowd of other crew, who always seemed to tolerate Slow Hours better than the cast, came to her and threw herself dramatically across her cocladist&rsquo;s lap, requesting some brushings to get the paint flecks out of her tail while she thought about how to say what she needed to say.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Slow Hours, I made a friend,&rdquo; she said, relying on the comparatively formal name as opposed to Slow — and she was the only one Slow Hours would accept that name from — or Slowers to convey a bit of the gravity of the question.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell me of your friend, my dear,&rdquo; Slow Hours replied, setting up a cone of silence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I met them at a dance,&rdquo; she said, looking down to her claws as they doodled on the stage. &ldquo;I went out with Beholden and Unbidden to some crazy biker bar that was also having a mathcore band performing, and I met them in the pit.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You were your big self, yes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She nodded. &ldquo;We danced for a bit in the pit and then got some drinks and talked outside, then danced some more.&rdquo; When Slow Hours remained attentively silent, she continued. &ldquo;And that was it. That is all I ever do, right? Go to a show, get wasted, maybe get laid, and then I go back to the stuff I really enjoy. I have my friends here. I have my work. I have you and Beholden and A Finger Pointing–&rdquo; This was before she had openly started referring to them by familial terms. &ldquo;–and Beckoning and Muse and that is all I need! I do not need much else to continue to from one day to the next. I do not <em>do</em> love or deep friendships. Not like that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Slow Hours nodded. &ldquo;I sense a &lsquo;but&rsquo;, Speck.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wellll&hellip;&rdquo; Motes said, pushing herself back up to sitting. &ldquo;I do not do love, but a lot of people do, including a lot of the people I wind up spending the night with in Big Motes mode. I am honest and up front, duh, and most understand that this is just for the fun of it. I am a healthy woman, right? I am two centuries old, but I am still thirty, yeah? I like sex as much as any two hundred year old woman in her thirties.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She nodded, laughing.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One or two have gotten big feelings for me, but most get it. We negotiate boundaries and move on with our lives, though. There are so many people here! It is not a big deal if someone says no that early on.&rdquo; Motes laughed, adding, &ldquo;Once, one of them showed up here looking for me, and A Finger Pointing just about tore him in half.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Slow Hours smiled, but said gently, &ldquo;You are stalling, my dear.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She groaned and buried her face against her cocladist&rsquo;s shoulder. &ldquo;I knooow. Anyway, this person and I got started talking about what we like in lasting friendships that we do not really care about in one-night stands and&hellip;and they just seem like a really good person.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And you think you might like to follow up on that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They are just into all sorts of things I am. They paint — people, mostly, and some animals — and like a lot of the same music, and also&hellip;also are into the whole little thing. They suggested we forget the sex part and maybe do a regular sort of get-together thing.&rdquo; She hesitated before adding, far more bashfully, &ldquo;You know. As kids.&rdquo;</p>
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