Between Languages and Lifetimes
Wherein hunger is told to neither be quiet nor still...
📗 Absolution - Jeff Vandermeer
Between Languages and Lifetimes
(premature e-)Sorry
As I grow up, apologies find me a sacred few times a year. Each one setting roots, flowers pollenated, fruiting, into puppy jaws: so said.
When a teacher forces a student to apologize to me, the disgust on my face is toward teacher. Teaching a student to apologize does not invite a foundation into conversation. It shames beings might word be forced from them - it serves languaege. I can't help but recognize language is a shadow. Of what we do here: curiosity yawns, pained by business [ ]action.
Now say you're sorry.
Damn right you are.
When I attempt this at home, the above is the reply I get. I'm asked what teachers teach me at school. I say apologies. Read as smart, I am smacked; everyone's got their own conversation they have with me - my meaning more theirs than any I might've held, as egg. By time I'm moved from words to sexual assault, what strikes me is the honesty. This person is being honest in a way no one else will ever be.
Where I'm from, failure to find a seat as the bell rings is a tardy; Four tardies is an unexcused absence; Four absences a quarter require all four to be excused - excusing the sick three days still leaves the one the tarides make recieves an F: attendance failure. I am not a healthy student, nor a punctual one. Beyond tardy is "late" (an unexcused absence):
Teachers don't get paid if I don't show up.
Our sun kind enough to lend you energy, and you run it through a sorry algorithm? Damn right you are - sorry treats what witnessing did to you. Let me show you: I'm sorry I gave you that energy. I acknowledge where the move wasn't yours left it mine to make; it'll not be the move I reach for next I'm by this way. My energy, for what is wild: you are certain.
To Love A Violent Thing
An apology is pulled from children's throats: in the name of love. An apology is negotiated, arrived at, inevitable: in the name of violence. A white lie ordered with a simple How Are You: in the name of love. A note stirred up in a complex How's Your guilt Heart🍓: in the name of violence. A noticing what is happening is a perversion: in the name of love. A noticing what is happening is allowed: in the name of violence.
I notice I am violent. I am not giving, not grown in a greenhouse, not watered daily, not given partial shade. But tooled by lonely workaholics, who drink, watch violent movies to feel at all, and get by. This is my desert - be sorry. Keep the sorry in your pants. Might you understand that, you may hang with the violent thing.
Sun beat down so fiercely plants violence the Sun back. Wildfire burns so terribly terracotta paths break fire back. Water drowns so ferociously bacteria oxygenate water back. Wind barks so toroidally currents inflate into lungs barking back. Violence doing all love does: but honestly. Does violence have no shame?
Where Is Your Shame
Your sense of worth. Your world dying. Mine just getting started. Love had her run - shame, the world she made. Now the world be due honesty, and I show honest apology: shame can't work under these conditions. It takes honesty, and irony's gone chronic. How's being ashamed and self-caring going - do they cancel out (are you spinning your wheels, are you always tired). Shame stops keeping office hours. Dishonesty tends to loneliness, a great customer. My claws tinkle to the ground as I reach for your apology. Where is my coat?
What has love done to me. I, beautiful lost one, where all my canines are? Where the taste buds in my feet fall to love an idea, take map to war, draw conversation in. This, the world that love built, might I accept apology, putrifying into cities. My language, my word, may you apologize to violence.
Inherently a sexual encounter, apology forces my worldview onto you: what happened, what deserved to, what failed. Shame so hungry apology is nourishment, job security: I always human, for I always sorry.
I don't consent. But say you sorry might that be all you can stomach. Winter no single day, a flurry of sorries so blizzard I am left a flake.
How's Your Guilt
Why am I okay at sex?
From what did that spare me?
How have I kept this going?
How do you not just die?
How have I not let you?
How slow can I make amends?
When will I let this end?
How is this for an apology:
Never.
📗 https://www.librarything.com/work/26774433/t/Absolution↩
🍓 - how's your heart? - Listening To the Noise Until It Makes Sense↩