I try to do it alright
{{ | date=09/04/2018 | time=18:00 EST | summary=Alma leaves The Euthanatos | cast=
| st=The Undisputed Truth
| place_name=Ann Arbor
| place_desc=Alma is in Ann Arbor to explain her decision to leave. It's
taken longer than she wanted to actually get here. She shows up agitated and in
a fluster explaining that she has something important to discuss and wishes
that her realization hadn't taken so long... and so and so forth as you
might expect from a flighty ornithologist.
She has a paper for her mentor. It has Wednesday's number with an explanation: "If you find Wednesday, you find everyone."
The pressure grows, pressure
| log=Is None always in the graveyard? Is that their home? It seems like,
every time Alma shows up, they're there. None doesn't look better; also
doesn't look worse, or maybe time and exposure simply rewrite memory: this
is the shape of None now. Gray-feathered.
None takes in so much of that in the rush it comes out in, because this is not their first Alma-rodeo. It's only when there's a rounded space for breath that they speak. "Tikh hai, beti," None says. It's ok, with that odd word that Alma knows means daughter without meaning daughter. "What is your insight, today."
Alma pulls out a paper with some logistics for contacting people in Detroit. "Acarya," She says, still using this older world with them now. "Here, you need this. So does Detroit. Acarya," her eyes glisten, "I need to leave the tradition. I didn't know what was hurting me so much all this time, and I've figured it out. I don't want to leave you without a way to--No one in the city cares enough about people to respect the dead. I'm worried they won't attend to this thing, and if I fall trying to then I don't want them all to be abandoned."
Brows go up, leaving None's forehead mightily creased, deep lines forming a mountainous shape there. "Leave we chakravanti," they say, concern apparent. "Lekin, this thing you speak of - respect the dead. It is a call your heart hears, nahin?"
"It is more than that. It is respect for all things. A respect-love,
Acaryla, there are these different types. I want to hold everyone--alive,
dead--I wanted to be able to hold that spirit I sent a letter to until they
calmed down and could come back to themselves. I want to hold hands with
families who--,"
She takes a few breaths to slow herself down. "I feel a calling that is part
of being to guard the world and all people in it--life is people too. I had
this dream to witness the world and all the people in it. If I don't see, I
cannot understand consequences."
"And I hve this caling in my heart to share Perspective, Being?,
Experience of Being, with you, with everyone in authority--so that we all
truly understand consequences. truly truly. Because any Mistakes at our
scale are horrifying. Horror. It hurts to think of mistakes like that. It
hurts to think of killing. Hurts."
"If I stay with you I have no--I do not belong to myself. I won't be free to
choose. I thought maybe--in that dream I could help people even when I did
not beleive them--I thought I could."
"No, Acarya, I would be false to stay. I would be lying. I want to belong to myself. I want to have freedom to choose and to understand. I need to think about things a long time. a long time. they will all fall in to place. Like they have. With the cards. when I realized how much I ignored of all the conversation of everyone over all of history. Acaryla, it takes me forever to learn things." She looks at them. She has been searching their face this entire time. Sometimes she tears up. Sometimes she has a stubborn resolve on her face. It wavers.
None's head tips up just a little, and they regard Alma with - well, who knows. A critical eye? A search for something? "You learn with speed, beti. A babe blinks only at the world for a year and a day, and then speaks only single words, out of turn; their errors are many. And for this they are not judged. But too they do not apprehend their errors; you are newly consumed by errors you have not made. What is this, that grows in you? What seed of doubt takes your heart?" They seem much less emotional than Alma, but that's average for them.
Alma looks steadily at them. "Doubt is good." Alma insists. "I can--I can throw it through windows. It's a solid foundation." omg the mixed metaphors on this kid. "It means I will never stop learning. But-but you know. I don't beleive in this reincarnation you beleive. And this is a core--this is how you can kill someone without entirely harming them or the world around them. In Gestalt psychology we say 'the whole is other than the sum of its parts'. You kill the entire universe if you kill someone. because everything cascades. everything. And people, you deny that they have choice. and deny the possibility of help. of restorative practice." None can probably tell she wishes she wasn't as garbled as all this. It all made sense before she got here.
There's a tiny head-wiggle from None, a press of their lips. Alma can probably read it as... oh, mild agitation. "You misunderstand, then, child. I believe nothing. I know, or I do not. You think us capricious, perhaps - this is a thing I do not know. And many are the chakravanti who have in their time loosed their blades in haste; this I do. If it kills the universe to turn the wheel for one, then never should we heal; for if we remove the root of the sickness, do we not uproot the body? Should not disease be given its hour?" A pause, a probing look, the voice now gentler: "Would you do nothing, beti?"
Alma recalls what Wednesday told her. Is chagrined. She apologizes, "I read
more than what people say, and I'm trying hear what someone says and no
more. It's only a recent insight. I apologize." She pauses a moment in
reflection on that. On to the big question.
"Acarya!" She says, with the excitement of a kid who has just discovered
something. This is an echo lingering from her first discovery. "I eat roots.
I choose to. I read about people not eating roots. You pull them up and
might kill fungus, might kill insects... hyrdopo--" She stops her tangent.
"I don't know." She tells them. "Why do I do something instead of
nothing?" She's thought about that a lot. It's a huge root system all
tangled up in her mind. Or maybe a current that was going along and all of
suddent there's something causes a fuckton of eddies instead of things
getting along now down the river already would you?
"I'm looking for words, but right now I have what is in my heart and in my understanding of the natural world that I've studied for years. Everything is part of this. Yes, sometimes fires should not be put out." She looks down in thought a second--"I don't know as much about diseases," she adds. a bit too literally.
“Acchcha,” says None. “Him that does not see bears not the weight of indecision. But him that sees suffer under it.” They quiet, and there’s a long, quiet moment - then a turn away from Alma, to regard for a second that mausoleum they recently sat in. This isn’t to leave her, though - it’s for a look. They turn back. “You’ve the gift of sight. And a mind full of angry bees. The knowing that is when to act - this comes from a quiet mind. And I would see you seek it, and do the duty you promised: to lift the forgotten. Not to abandon it to the noise.”
She reacts firsts to the last. "That duty is in me. It is stronger than any promise. If it ever goes away then I am not me." She sits with that a moment and manages to hold back some tears, but she pulls her hair. "Everything. Everything tells stories. It's blinding," and it's like she is trying to reassure her teacher or herself, "But I'm better. I practice." She's thinking of how more focus her Aikido lessons give her lately. Ever since those cards. So there's hope. "I'll never abrogate that duty."
None lifts their head, sharp-eyed. "And yet you would leave."
Alma gives a distressed grunt sound and rocks back and forth a little. She has a lot of false starts like shes trying to say many sentences all at once and it's hard to get down all the words. She's fierce and intense. "It's not--I can't leave myself. but, None, you--no not you--Tradition is noisy. You are all so noisy. I need to be outside." She's contradicted herself, is babbling, is trying to orienteer. "I love you Arcarya. Please take that paper."
Perhaps out of an abundance of contrariness - or perhaps simply because None is None - they stand silent at the charge of noise. They watch Alma, briefly, then look at the paper, consider it with an outstretched hand for some few seconds before taking it. Without opening it, they return eyes to Alma for several more seconds. "Namaste," they say, and then turn, like to walk toward the mausoleum. Halfway turned, their eyes pause - as with some thought - and then they nod, and proceed to walk off with the smooth, slow steps of an arthritic, but capable, body.
Alma shaking, watches them go. She starts to walk towards where she parked her bike, but has to stop for a moment to lean on the ledge of a tall gravestone while she clears her eyes from crying. After some moments, she starts again. and bikes away.
I feel the weight of a billion years
Come down on me, come down
}}
