Dear me of a later time and place,
I am writing this on the 7th day of this cycle. The point of this exercise is to make things, and right now, what I need to make is amends.
The details are important, and this isn’t the place for them. The point of it is that while I don’t consider myself to be someone who is particularly furious or intentionally cruel, I feel I can locate myself closer to those identifiers after this week. Granted, I have also felt justified, wronged, and generous in the midst of this, but I don't think these feelings are exculpatory (you can be simultaneously wronged and cruel) and even if I could go as far as to say I haven’t been unkind recently, it must be acknowledged that favorable position in a conflict is necessarily different from resolution of that conflict itself (you can be right and still have a problem that is undealt with). So I will try and make amends before this cycle ends.
Alright, whatever, psychobabble, postulating, intellectualizing, you done? I am not. I want an apology, too, or more practically, to not be the only one involved in the creation of amends. But what I actually want is a more perfect long term memory that will strengthen my capacity for grace and gratitude, or if all else fails, that will increase my index of available examples to resort to in the heat of verbal battle. But actually, what I want is to exist within a proactively apologetic system, one that operates by seismographic logic and anticipates fractures in advance. In my head, this system is dynamic and depends not only on the immediate actors in a conflict but all those in who participate in life’s daily moments, those of contention and also moments of peace because (cue me reaching for the metaphorical cookie jar that I am using to further mix my metaphors) everyone has a hand in it, all of it. But what I actually want is to peacefully witness the genesis of demonstrated knowledge (by God, let it be demonstrated), to lay my eyes on evidence that things can change and be changed, all sorts of things, but mostly structures that induce all kinds of conflict (personal, political, psychological, familial, fiscal, personalpoliticalpsychological, familialfiscal) and that feed on the endurance of pain.
At the moment, I am in partial possession of all these things, a received apology that, in my somewhat-bitter opinion, needs to find its way back into the oven to finish baking, a memory that improves with embodiment, a makeshift seismograph, enlightenment that peaks through mental clouds at different points in the day. I am also in possession of a question and it is this: by what process do things become joyless? How do people/things/processes/relationships find their way back?
Am I making sense? I am making enough sense to myself. I am making enough sense to myself about nonsense and about things that make no sense. I’ll settle for that.
Other nonthings I want to make:
A big deal out of the things that are a big deal
An attempt at trying
Up my mind
That’s all, apart from amends.