A Secant Query

Between Addiction and Contract

Wherein I look for a body...

Between Addiction and Contract

a note on tone: Spoilers! I turn out fine. I'm alive, love myself, am married to myself, and serve a world which will take and take until I'm gone.

May it take long after that

I've ferried many addictions to tend to loved ones needs. What addiction might let me tend to my person? Let me review. Feel free to skip to the next section as I avail myself of the space to think out loud.

At five, I need to digest loved ones screaming, so I dissociate - that's the contract. At eight, I need to endure being an outcast, so I wander - that's the contract. At ten, I am forcefed every night, so all food others make me destroys me - that's the contract. At twelve, I need to survive this sexual assault, so I self-conclude in effigy - that's the contract.

At fourteen, I need to work food service to help pay mom's rent, so I drink - that's the contract. At seventeen, I need to do sex work to pay for my body's rent when my mom kicks me out, so I smoke - that's the contract. At eighteen, I need to build my own home, so I live in a straw home - that's the contract.

This year, my community asks me to care for my person, so I tend - that's the contract.

Annuling Said Contracts

Tending! I am addicted to tending! I love it, and can't get enough. Am an eruption of happening tending to care, each moment my person. My contract is to tend my person. At the end of displacement, I can recognize movement and location as the same, and person void, so stop tending. I do.

At nineteen, I can recognize my mom will never be home and I stop drinking. I do. At twenty-one, I can recognize my dissociations are more aligned with reality than my loved one's screams. I do. At twenty-five, I recognize my latest abuser is an ocean away and I can stop smoking. I do.

Five years ago, I recognize I can live in a town longer than one year. I do. Three years ago, I recognize I can get on my first lease. I do. Last year, I recognize I can marry the part of me that self-concludes. I do. This year, I recognize I can find home in water. I do.

I'm in perfect suspension now. No contracts. If I was a philosopher, I'd be scribbling frantically to find myself permission and call breathing quits, to marry wisdom as true mystery, and be movement through air placing leaf like soil for comet dust. Fertile, flowy, free to transform.

breath

Scribble all I might, I remain. I orbit earth these bodies of cells indistinguishable from Moon. My breath this tide, dissolution every curling wave, reformation riptide; existence all that froths 🫧 between them.

I die now, now, and now; note the loop, let it run. Complete, a life entirely its own until such time is mine again. I have time to digest, may I break down time so community may have an easy go of letting moments with contracts run their course.

Law this year fails recognition once and again enough times my community begins the slow work of annulling contracts. In one, neighbors believe in the shame of yesterday failing faith in an abundance today. May I serve.

Shame's Wild Fermentation

Industrially-produced shame institutions culture through childhood found me too busy to culture shame in me. Never exposed to shots of shame as my contemporaries get, my life is organically traumatizing: my shame not manufactured. Shitting in my pants for lack of bathroon in my teens - have I no shame? No.

Would my community like help with thiers? Thier shame thrived in monocrop-optimal artificial conditions. I thank my community for the opportunity to ask one question:

Where Is Your Shame?