Weakness

There’s an unsaid tiredness to accommodating weakness.

To obscure the truth in order to keep working with one another. Walking on eggshells.

Anything that disturbs me only reveals my misgivings: if one cannot accept reality ahead, they must update their model, and sometimes that update destroys all the dunes you built labyrinths above. In that destitution, by subzero nightfall, you’ll claw yourself into the next hearth until you learn to light the fire in yourself. So people set up the shelters and while you sleep you get a collar and a snack and a backwards assumption that corrodes you, everything you touch.

Our current modern world accommodates weakness to excess. To enslave, of course. (“Soft power!” you may breathlessly whisper.) One can feel the fog threading each head and one knows not to say unless you want to be crucified. It’s an interesting way to subjugate people: give them lies they’ll defend until they’re neutered and mere sirens sent out to extinguish the remaining.

It’s not that I don’t like you. I just don’t want to interact in weakness, fuel my own weakness, unless the exchange is understood. That this “normal” so used to and tiptoeing and masking reality is suffocating. Everywhere anyone goes they’ll have to deal with weakness, their own or the other, so this is my only respite. I don’t want the snacks and misunderstanding side-effects. Ward away the false ambrosia of contingent fondness. Perfumes and spices.

There are only a few ways to deal with weakness: either subjugate it, cast away from it, or silently endure it. There aren’t many escapes if it permeates even by the luxury of bed and watch, and subjugation is competing against state actors controlling TikTok.

So one silently endures the lectures and assumptions on how the world works. Too, endures the excessively druggened and other addictions and one’s own. Closeness submerging needles into each chamber of heart. Misconstrued openness as a hidden dominance; to implicitly feel the shadow of the hydra greenlighting every correct opinion somehow coincidentally yours. It feels right, after all.

Knowing I won’t bother saying what’s condemned, though you can always look for it between the lines.

Well, this era will pass.

Until then I relish the fact that I just don’t have to participate. At least here.