Day 43

Spoiler Alert! May contain planning-stage plot/character details or other spoilers!

16 Dec 2015

So, my baby brother got married.

It was crazy, exhausting, and perfect.

Nothing’s going to be easy for them and I don’t know why they’re not terrified of all the challenges ahead, but it happened.

How quickly things change. I had to practice saying ‘sister-in-law’, and we’re all happy they’ll be gone over Christmas because it’s just too soon, too new to have the family disrupted.

I wonder if it’s easier when kids get married younger, when you haven’t had as many years to find the balance…

I like to understand things, to work them over and find the meaning, to piece apart people and their problems into neat piles of cause and effect, impulse and motivation. Emotion, commitment, love; so many human behaviours are complex, irrational.

I am afraid that my stories either press for a rigid, block-by-block construction of rational, obvious motivations and reactions, or wallow in contrived mires of emotion for the sake of introducing complexity without understanding humanity.

Or something.

And then I worry that my stories are all navel-gazing and no action, so there’s really no winning.

But it does reflect some of how Cole interacts with her world. She sees herself as separate, apart. She feels that division keenly, although she would never recognize that as a negative, at least not at first. She clings to the familiarity and security of the rules, of Tower Rule, in part because she can’t understand, won’t allow herself to relate to anything less than that rigidly reliable structure.

If she were able to be honest with herself, if she wasn’t divided between Cadence and Cole, she would admit that the alien in the eyes of the other is terrifying and alluring, that it fascinates her in a way that makes her feel sick inside, feverish. She is like an addict, resisting the call of a drug that she doesn’t remember. It is only the feeling of cold sweat on her skin, the tremors that threaten to show her weakness in the twitch of limb and the quiver of fingers at rest that hint at the terrible strength of that call. Come back, come back to humanity, come back to community, to family, to love.

She doesn’t know it, but her power, her hope, and her salvation lie in the way that the call remains deep within her. She can still hear Cadence’s voice. She actively resists feeling anything, which means that the ability to experience the world as more still remains to threaten her careful balance.

Although she would never admit it, Cole is not incorruptible. Her weakness comes from strength and will become strength that supports many.

Wednesday

Start time: 10:00 am

Location: couch/living room

Drinking: mint tea

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