update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/idumea/001.html

@@ -21,6 +21,7 @@
 <p>We must imagine these things because they are not true.</p>
 <p>I do not know how it happened, but one cloudy day, she was asking after her friend and then her mind was turned all in on itself, was wrapped and folded three times, turned, and then wrapped and folded thrice more. Some malicious baker kneaded and kneaded and kneaded, and when next she woke up, sixteen hours and twenty three minutes later, her mind remained in some unknown, integral way tied up into knots.</p>
 <p>But that was three hundred years ago.</p>
+<hr />
 <p>The Woman wanders the world some few times a month, stepping out into unknown nowheres and known somewheres to be seen, to be perceived as still existing. I do not know why she does this, but it is important to her that someone witness her existing. It is a ritual she follows around like a little puppy: she will not know what will happen when she first does it properly, but she hopes it will be something wonderful.</p>
 <p>The Woman has many rituals. </p>
 <p>She has rituals for eating food, for feeding the vessel in which she makes her home. There is no order in which she properly consumes food, she may consume it in any order, but there is an order in which she must appreciate food. You must understand: she must do this for everything she takes into her body. She must look at it before she touches it, must touch it before she smells it, must smell it before she eats it, and before all of these she must say a prayer.</p>
@@ -34,6 +35,7 @@
 <p>She campaigned after uploading for individual rights for uploaded minds, before they were even cladists, before forking and sensorium messages and all of the other benefits that the System has to offer.</p>
 <p>She was whole because she maintained — even while overflowing, I think! — so many deeply held convictions that those around her need not suffer, even if she herself did. Especially, she would say, because she herself did.</p>
 <p>I think that she would say, however, that she was <em>too</em> whole. I think she would say that she was <em>too</em> full, too much, too alive. I think she would say that almost three hundred years of a life that was lived as hers was, with her mind turned in on itself, was too much life. I think she would laugh that hoarse, dry laugh that always sounded like tears were on the way, and say that thirty years was probably too much for her.</p>
+<hr />
 <p>&ldquo;I wish,&rdquo; The Woman said some decades after Michelle Hadje uploaded, after she became End Of Endings of the Ode clade, of the tenth stanza, &ldquo;I wish I could unbecome.&rdquo;</p>
 <p>Her Friend frowned and replied, &ldquo;Do you mean you wish you could die?&rdquo;</p>
 <p>&ldquo;No, I specifically do not mean that.&rdquo;</p>
@@ -46,6 +48,7 @@
 <p>&ldquo;Not yet,&rdquo; The Woman said. &ldquo;Not yet.&rdquo;</p>
 <p>&ldquo;Is there a time when you will, then?&rdquo;</p>
 <p>&ldquo;I think so, just not quite yet.&rdquo;</p>
+<hr />
 <p>Every few years, there would be a gathering on her birthday — their birthday, for Her Friend was also of the Ode clade, also of Michelle Hadje — and they would sit somewhere, whether it was out on the porch of the home The Woman shared with the rest of the tenth stanza, or out on the dandelion-speckled lawn, or, once the door had been built into the house, on rickety chairs outside a cafe over identical coffees.</p>
 <p>Every time they would meet up thus, The Woman and Her Friend would take a few minutes to themselves to have the same conversation:</p>
 <p>Her Friend would ask, &ldquo;Have you figured out what unbecoming looks like yet, my dear?&rdquo;</p>