55 lines
5.5 KiB
HTML
55 lines
5.5 KiB
HTML
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<title>Zk | intro</title>
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<h1>Zk | intro</h1>
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<article class="content">
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<blockquote>
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<p>Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was.</p>
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<p>\parencite{intro-to-job}</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I’ve heard said that “forgiveness is releasing the hope for a better past” \parencite{wakefield} but it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? That quote itself is more complicated than that:</p>
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<div class="verse">There are ways around being the go-to person
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even for ourselves
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even when the answer is clear
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clear like the holy water Gentiles would drink
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before they realized
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forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past</div>
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<p>Primed as we are to take text out of context, wrap our own needs around it, and pretend that it is in all ways applicable to all situations (for did I not already ramble about mistaking accidental, individual symbols for universal ones?), it’s so easy to misremember that the better past we hope for is just some dream, some thing we cling to long after the us that lived that past has died.</p>
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<p>Who knows if I was the go-to person, the punching bag for my Elihu, the object of her simple angers? Who knows if they remember me? She cut contact, without telling me, without telling me why, and who knows if she even knows the reason?</p>
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<p>Who cares, other then me?</p>
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<p>All stories are perforce interpolations within real events.</p>
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<p>The story of identity, the story of coming to terms with existing in some particular way, is as a much an interpolation into the whole of us as anything. I am trans, yes, but that is not the story; that is the identity. I am who I am specifically because I did what I did, I learned what I learned, I changed how I changed. No amount of academic language will change that, no overanalysis of this or that will make me be anything else.</p>
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<p>“If Matthew died on September 6th, 2012,” I asked myself some years ago, “Was Madison born then?”</p>
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<p>That date, September 6th, had nothing in particular to do with gender. The answer was no, after all. Madison was born some two intercalary years later. Matthew’s death had nothing to do with gender — he died when his friend died, when Margaras hit that barricade at fifty miles an hour.</p>
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<p>Matthew died and then I don’t remember what happened. I suppose there was a few years of fumbling around, poking and prodding at various parts of his body in the hopes that something could be salvaged. The hair, maybe? Or the softness of skin? Perhaps he could simply be recycled into something new, the same lump of clay molded and remolded into something new until some fresher breath of life was breathed into it.</p>
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<p>If Matthew died in 2012 and Madison wasn’t born until a few years later, if I don’t remember those in-between years, then I keep questioning whether or not I actually existed then. I suppose 2013 involved dealing with the tic, and I guess we moved in 2014, but both of those stand-out events feel as though they happened to someone else, someone not Madison.</p>
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<p>If Matthew died in 2012, why was I not born then?</p>
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<p>In reply to asking myself that, I say, “If Matthew died on September of that year, then he was sick long before. This was part of his long, slow death rattle.”</p>
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<p>He’d been sick for months. He’d contracted something terminal, been infected with some terrible, memetic illness earlier that year. Words had been whispered, implications, innuendo, little hints in growing silence and distance. These drilled their way into him, teased out an immune response in the form of defensiveness, then left a husk behind.</p>
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<p>Some long winter followed. He had died and crumpled to the ground. He mouldered a while before decomposing into the soil. He lay dormant beneath the earth, waiting for a thaw. Madison began to grow during that false spring that hits at the beginning of March, those two weeks of warm weather that convince you that winter must be over, it must have passed and it was time to air out the house, to wash your jackets and hang them up for the year. We always forget about the second winter, but false spring is enough for the buds to peek out.</p>
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<p>Stories are as bound to time as we are, and all we can do is steal back a bit of that memory through however many words. All we can do with these memories pinned in place is regard them from a second level of distance and make guesses. All I can do now is make guesses as to the meaning of however many conversations — those very real words lost to the whims of technology — that lead to the slow and not always but often painful death of who I was.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>Page generated on 2023-03-12</p>
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