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My mind whirred and whirred madly over statistics and history, ancestry, all those men lining the corridors of wards, all those bleeping machines and frail, stick-thin corpses. Though I did not know them, their ghosts haunt me. I am, somehow, their descendant: I arrived into a world full of ghosts, and owed a part of myself to each of them.
Nature, for him, was the presence of God incarnating through the world, and he invented a word – inscape – to mean uniqueness, the quality that makes each thing in the world a constant expression of its own self, and nothing else.
My mind rushed through images of him, then images of my ex-boyfriend Elias, then all the other boys I had known and lost, their faces appearing and then falling back into the crowd. They all had something in common, but I hadn’t made the connection until now, and the connection brought things into focus, made things feel more real, set up a chain of threat and consequence in my mind. It felt dangerous to admit it, as though the commonality was a sort of curse, a brokenness in them, in us, but I knew the brokenness was in the world instead.
When they said, ‘I’m just scared that you’ll be unhappy,’ what I really felt they were saying was ‘I am scared that if you continue being yourself, we will make you unhappy.’ A sort of threat, veiled as a kindness.
They did not want me to be happy by making happiness possible, but by asking me to live in a world which they knew was set against me.
Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
We struggled most over those which meant most, those whose cadence and fragile thought seemed so carefully made, so delicate, that taking it apart and putting it together again risked the soul of it seeping out.
I say ‘hope’, because even though I was mimicking, even though I was hidden, and the hiding was crippling that fragile part of myself I knew to be true, I was also safe in my hiding. In my hiding, I was loved.
