One of the many voices of my childhood reaches out toward me, and steals the laughter from my face. Yes, my childhood had been a chorus of these voices—their opinions, their thoughts, their guidance. As one of the younger siblings, it had always been my unwanted due, I suppose. They had all thought to parent me in the only ways they knew how, perhaps—and for each of them, it resulted in a different kind of pragmatism.
Hagar, of all of them, reminded me the most of my mother. (Or, more precisely—the hollowed out places of my memory where she no longer exists. I did not need to remember her, when each Ieshan held her in a different vision; I did not need to worship our creation myth, being too young to ever love it, being too young to ever know it, when she died. Hagar, though—somehow, in her dealings with me, she reminds me of the shade that our mother is in my mind, the shade beneath the bloodied dove feathers and the months of speechlessness, of grief like a murder).
I should not be surprised when she reaches out with her fine silks and wipes the blood from my face; but, somehow, the gentleness shocks me. Distance becomes all of us Ieshans—I cannot remember the last time one had thought to take care of me. There is a dark man behind her; but he turns away; my smile reappears, but it is too sharp to show amusement, it is too sharp to be anything except for a humorous grimace, a flash of teeth in my dark, dark face.
“Making friends,” I say, as answer. Despite the sardonic nature of my comment, my tone seems unabashed, genuine. My eyes flash brightly. “Want to join in? It’s quite a bit of fun, actually.” I am caught between a sense of violation—that she found me here, in my private recluse. It is no secret what I do with my free time; but it is, largely, a matter of privacy.
(Dr. Yeshan had once suggested that, perhaps, I reveled in such violence delights because it separated me from all I had known, and found familiar. He said the discomfort became my familiarity; the acknowledgment of a lack of control could, in some way, give me a semblance of power over choosing this chaos over the chaos of my life).
I still think Dr. Yeshan is full of shit.
“Your date didn’t stick around long,” I comment, turning away from her touch. There’s no use.
I just let the hot blood run.
"Speech." || @
we are born like this, into these carefully made wars
where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
