Untitled recovery piece 4
You speak for a good, long while, of shameful struggle and of deep gratitude, of people you hardly know and those closest to you. You forget bits and you ask for help, I side-track you repeatedly, and I make the grave mistake of correctly guessing one of your big reveals when you ask. I say it lightly, meaning nothing and without thinking. You take it lightly. We both know where I couldn’t have learned it any other way, and there’s much more story to tell. Still, I’ve turned away or overrun too many good people exactly as I’ve learned, so I’m learning new things all the time. Every time you mention your mom I wish I could do anything but nod, but I can’t imagine a way to ask or tell you the things in my heart. I like to imagine that yours is large even when I’ve seen how hard it can be. The work you’ve done there has softened it, so sometimes I’m blessed by that surrender of a learned heart. Luckily, for every thing you’ve taught me along the way which now I must revisit, you’ve something new to teach me which I know won’t end the same. I don’t know that I’ll ever tell you something like that, but I hope when you see me, somehow you can know that I am as much yours as I am anyone’s. You would tell me I am my own, but I’ve learned new things too, and I know better.
tea. the kettle pops softly, radiating heat, while a small but steady breath of steam leaves the spout. cha he, cold. a hand in space, seeming to touch nothing, but still feeling, outward. in—open. water in, water out. tea in, water in, in—tea out. in—drink. This odd note still bugs me, in that I can't quite place it; between the awkward age and potential storage flavor, I lean toward the latter since it seemed consistent with a couple other teas, but... were those even in the same storage? or were those from another collector? This pot seems to affect it more than the last, but only slightly... The other day with all those people I really enunciated the "a" in that: AA-ffective. What would an "effective" pot be? Any of mine? wait—tea. water in, in—tea out. in—drink.
Rodya leaves Marmeladov dead on his family's couch and moves back out into the night. I can't claim to know that same feeling he described of pardon, but I know a feeling of craving atonement and sometimes feeling as if I've found it, as though this new good I'm walking away from can somehow free me from whatever hangs heavy on my head. The continued craving shows, even in what he sees there as his great exchange: a proper death for an untimely, lonely death that came before: And thy servant Rodion.
I feel a strange freedom of self-determination in the middle of the night; though there seems nothing inherently special about that time to allow for it, and I could just as easily decide to do something new during the day, there still seems to me a certain suspension, a lack of inertia which holds things open and allows one to move freely about the cabin.
To believe one more prepared to handle the next moment's challenges when unmoored from past experience is initially counterintuitive, but upon trying, it becomes apparent that one maintains all existing faculties of knowledge and memory even through the process of loosening the bounds of habit and other impulses toward continuity. It is okay to know what has been and how without the need to echo and reconstruct that here in the present. I cannot say outside that moment what needs to be there, so perhaps that open space at night is less useful than it might first appear, but look, it's almost dawn.
The other route into town really would have been better, especially at this time of day... even more so in this sort of weather. They marked this curve down to a limit of 45 years ago, not that you could tell by how people take it. I joked one year that it was an annual sign, heralding the turn of the seasons when someone went off (or at least into) the side. What a thing to remember while merging into traffic, only to discover that it's tonight that the season changed.
I walk and, as long as I remember, I smile at everyone. Many just stare, some nod (as I do) and some go further than I, to say hello. It's only when I forget that I seem to stare, and at that, I usually remember.
Thinking of what to write, I feel the mysticism has gone out of me. There seems to be no teaching or showing or convincing to do. I want to write that it's precisely because the self is a thought that dualism becomes possible, and that by constructing and partitioning out a privileged representation of that which we believe amounts to that which has the feeling of being (but is perhaps still conceptually separate from the feeling itself) we are then able to place this in comparison with representations of other appearances in our conceptual workspace. An imagined version of my father shrugs, an imagined version of a friend says "sure, but I'm still here," and I write down all four instead just to be safe. The feeling strikes me that this all gets worse as I go on, the farther I get out into anecdotes and conceptual elaboration, or whatever else I have to decide is worth writing. The reality that the value here was exhausted some time ago sets in, and I know it's back to watching, for the time being. in—