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[rathercommon]

crystal | letter | cease and desist notices slipped under her door | action

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[elegiaque]

( if anyone were to ask gwenaëlle what she is, instead of just listening to her endlessly list the things she isn't and/or refuses to be—

it's a poet. still, always. )

You can't say anything with certainty, but you still should.

( words matter. the story matters. no accident that the poet is so preoccupied with narrative as force. )

Deciding it's something worth making true. Everything in life is just stories we tell ourselves—if someone tells you that you're small for long enough, you believe it. That's one way the world makes you that way. You get given a story. It's a form of resistance to tell your own.

Look at Flint. He understands that.

[shri]

[ And that softens something. Not something that could be pinned to anything directly if another were to look. Her shoulders lowering, the slight pull in the corner of her mouth. ]

You risked your life for me, Kitty, did you expect that to mean nothing to me?

[rathercommon]

I don't know.

[ Kitty shrugs, her shoulders tight. There's a pinched quality to her face - something halfway between discomfort and uncertainty. ]

If it makes us anything, it makes us comrades. Not family.

[rathercommon]

[ Kitty frowns at that last part. ]

What do you mean?

[elegiaque]

He's very deliberate. He's aware of his audience; I don't mean that he's false, in what he shows himself to be, but it's a choice made with forethought. He understands telling a story with every part. What that can mean.

[shri]

No, [ she shakes her head. ] comrades fight for each other. They kill for each other. I have had many.

[ But there is a difference, cut and clean and determined. ] But those that would sacrifice so much for each other? That is more, Kitty, that is family. In more than blood, but by action, and you will never find truer than by such things.

[rathercommon]

[ A short, sharp laugh, one that's bitter and unpleasant. ]

That's not really my experience with family.

[rathercommon]

I mean - I think he's careful about his image, sure. How's that resistance, though?

[elegiaque]

It's not big, or impressive, but it's—

We tell stories to teach people how to think. That's one reason why you can't just say something and have it be, that's why it's a conversation and not the end of one when you make a statement that you want to make true.

You think what he is is what he was told to be? I don't.

[rathercommon]

Well, I don't know if that's resistance, though. I'd say that's just survival, isn't it?

[elegiaque]

It depends on what you're thinking. Doesn't it? And what you do with that. And what it means.

We don't survive alone. And ideas survive, too. Sometimes longer than people. That's true of good ideas as much as bad ones, or we wouldn't survive at all.

[rathercommon]

Mm. I don't know, though. I don't know if you can make many good changes while being - you know - false.

[elegiaque]

Just because a change is a choice doesn't make it false. People aren't—

( a sigh, a grimace; ) People aren't that simple. You aren't that simple. Have you always been exactly what you are, right this very minute? You never had to decide you wanted better than what you had? You never had to change anything about your thinking, ever, in your entire life?

[rathercommon]

[ A huff of air provides an answer to that question. ]

But where I'm from, they make everyone false, and corrupt everyone's natures. I wasn't any exception to that.

[shri]

It should have been. That is what family is supposed to be. [ Her mouth pinches, an unhappy turn. ]

Will you tell me of them, your mother and father?

[elegiaque]

You can't have it both ways.

[rathercommon]

[ Kitty offers a tense shrug in response. She studiously does not look at Lakshmi. ]

Not really my mum and dad any longer. They made that pretty clear. Handed me over to the government to save their sorry skins and told me I wasn't the girl they'd raised. So there's nothing to talk about.

[rathercommon]

What do you mean?

[elegiaque]

Why do you get to decide that someone else making a choice isn't true, but yours was? That someone else improving their life is wrong, but it's all right when you did it?

[rathercommon]

No - I was false back then. This is who I am. Back then, keeping my head down and saying "please sir" and "sorry ma'am" and licking boots, that was false.

[elegiaque]

And that means you get to decide whether someone else making a change is true or false because...?

I mean, if I can't change or do anything good, I don't know why you're still speaking to me.

[rathercommon]

Well, you were the one who said he was telling a story.

[elegiaque]

And you decided a story is a lie. Everything is a story. Everyone has a story.

[rathercommon]

"Telling a story" implies constructing something, deliberately, doesn't it.

[elegiaque]

Yes, it does. And making a choice is something deliberate, too, they're not mutually exclusive, you don't have to be a fuckwit to be honest or we wouldn't be speaking because you are very honest and you can just ask Darton's cheap slut how much time I have for idiots.