Edits

content/draft/008.md

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-## Beholden — 2362
+# Beholden — 2362
 
 Beholden never quite understood play.
 
@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@ Or tried to go alone, as always there was someone willing to go with her, asking
 
 The only time she accepted the company was when Dry Grass, fresh out of her meeting with Sasha, did not so much volunteer as, wiping freshly-shed tears from her face, ask Beholden if they could go for a walk together so that she could talk. That Beholden had already slipped on her hoodie, had already drank a glass of water, was already heading towards the door suggested that this was a form of volunteering, but Dry Grass certainly deserved as much as anyone the chance to talk through the position she had found herself in, so Beholden reluctantly said yes.
 
-The two walked in silence, both looking down more at the sidewalk as it passed beneath their feet than around them, both processing in their own way.
+The two walked in silence, both looking down at the sidewalk as it passed beneath their feet, both processing in their own way.
 
 "Hey, uh," Beholden said at last once they had made it halfway through the neighborhood, halfway around the usual loop. "Are you okay? I mean, things are awful, but are you feeling okay?"
 
@@ -116,7 +116,7 @@ Dry Grass nodded.
 
 "So it took me a lot of getting used to." She hesitated, looked down to the gravel as she kicked a foot through it. "I am a little ashamed to say that I backed off from her for a while when she did that. I took a lot of walks like this or went out to clubs on my own to...well, to not be around her. I loved her even then, but it felt like too much. 'Bee' is a compromise that felt on the edge of comfort at the time, though now it feels really good when she calls me that. She was so patient with me." Drawing her attention back to Dry Grass, she smiled, adding, "She calls you 'Ma 2.0', did you know that?"
 
-Dry Grass blinked, then burst out in laughter, laughing until once more the tears flowed down her cheeks, holding herself still on her swing with feet planted firmly on the ground.
+Dry Grass blinked, then burst out in laughter, laughing until once more the tears flowed down her cheeks, until she sobbed, holding herself still on her swing with feet planted firmly on the ground.
 
 Beholden waited in silence. She knew well the mechanics of a hysterical laugh-cry — she had at one point recorded A Finger Pointing falling into such and chopped it into little slivers of half-recognizable samples and haunted an entire album with it, so beautiful had she found it — and while her and Dry Grass's relationship did not include a whole lot of hugging, she still nudged herself to the side far enough to rub at her cocladist's shoulder until the tears once more slowed and she was once more able to breathe but for a few few aftershocks of chuckling.
 
@@ -144,17 +144,17 @@ Beholden laughed. "To her? Or as yourself?"
 
 "Oh, to her!" she said, smirking. "Though who knows, maybe I would give the slide version a go, myself."
 
-The conversation of good things continued — Motes designing the playground, Warmth In Fire designing the chalk lines that followed the two of them as they ran around, A Finger Pointing and Beholden sitting on the stoop of their home to watch the sun set while skunks played in the grass — until they grew weary of the swings digging into their backsides and hunger started tugging them back toward home and what joys they had built began to fade in the face of the immediate past.
+The conversation of good things continued — Motes designing the playground with it's slide that led to a hidden world of ghostly forests if you believed it would, Warmth In Fire designing the chalk lines that followed the two of them as they ran around, A Finger Pointing and Beholden sitting on the stoop of their home to watch the sun set while little ones played in the grass — until they grew weary of the swings digging into their backsides and hunger started tugging them back toward home and what joys they had built began to fade in the face of the immediate past.
 
 With each step, a bit of color once more seeped from the world and a bit more worry once more gnawed at Beholden's gut.
 
-Lunch, despite being a sauce served over rice, was all the same dry and ashen in Beholden's mouth as she struggled with so many swirling feelings, so many spiraling thoughts around what had happened.
+Lunch, despite being a sauce served over rice, was all the same dry and ashen in her mouth as she struggled with so many swirling feelings, so many spiraling thoughts around what had happened.
 
 Still, she managed to clean her plate, managed to straighten herself up for the meeting with Waking World, managed to only yell at him a little bit. She managed as best she could as they did their best to learn what paths forward they had.
 
 She tamped down her emotions throughout, press-fit them into place within her so that they would not spill over into the world around her, bottled them up, wrote a label on the jar, and set it on a shelf high in her mind to deal with later, right next to all of the other jars about which she had promised the same.
 
-She had to, at least for now, at least for the time being. She would need to reckon with the person that she had built herself up into. She would need to deal with all of the compromises that she had made in order to be Beholden. She was Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps! Sound and music director for the troupe! She was lead sound tech! This was the cost of engaging so closely with what had once been her dearest friend's specialty. Michelle acted, and later taught. AwDae was the sound engineer. This was the price she paid for being Au Lieu Du Rêve's very own AwDae. While the others within the stanza, within the clade may dance with em as they moved through the System, she, of all them, was perhaps one of the most entangled with em. It was Beholden who was with AwDae on her quiet walks, Beholden who was with AwDae, drunk under the stars, Beholden who was with AwDae when she was working. Or playing. Or crying. Or laughing. Or indulging. She could never escape em, try as she might, and so, from time to time, a woman needed a break from grief.
+She had to, at least for now, at least for the time being. She would need to reckon with the person that she had built herself up into. She would need to deal with all of the compromises that she had made in order to be Beholden. She was Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps! Sound and music director for the troupe! She was lead sound tech! This was the cost of engaging so closely with what had once been her dearest friend's specialty. Michelle acted, and later taught. AwDae was the sound engineer. This was the price she paid for being Au Lieu Du Rêve's very own AwDae. While the others within the stanza, within the clade, may dance with em as they moved through the System, she, of all them, was perhaps one of the most entangled with em. It was Beholden who was with AwDae on her quiet walks, Beholden who was with AwDae, drunk under the stars, Beholden who was with AwDae when she was working. Or playing. Or crying. Or laughing. Or indulging. She could never escape em, try as she might, and so, from time to time, a woman needed a break from grief.
 
 It was her fragility, and the only way she knew to reinforce herself was through setting such emotions aside. She would need to confront that, but not just yet, not with so much before her.
 
@@ -170,9 +170,9 @@ So she set her mind to caring for her love. It was as she had always done. It wa
 
 She pressed those emotions down and instead lingered on love. She lingered on her devotion to A Finger Pointing, on her protectiveness of her charge. She lingered on those good memories as best she could to keep the very air from tasting desiccating, to push away the feeling of sand gritting between her teeth.
 
-Once A Finger Pointing was settled at home and Motes had been checked on, once the message had been sent to Hammered Silver and they had eaten and settled down on the couch for the night to rest, to pretend to work, only then, did Beholden very carefully open the jarred emotions from earlier, carefully withdrawing them one by one and laying them out before herself in her mind. She did not touch them. She used tweezers or tongs or perhaps chopsticks to lift them free, nudge them to lay flat that she might read deeper into them.
+Once A Finger Pointing was settled at home and Motes had been checked on, once the message had been sent to Hammered Silver and they had eaten and settled down on the couch for the night to rest, to pretend to work, only then, did Beholden very carefully open the jarred emotions from earlier, carefully withdrawing them one by one and laying them out before herself in her mind. She did not touch them, hot as they were. She used tweezers or tongs or perhaps chopsticks to lift them free, nudge them to lay flat that she might read deeper into them.
 
-And then, exhausted by day, by the last few days, by worry over her Dot, her *dóttir*, by worry over her boss — "not your boss" the common refrain — she carefully replaced all of those emotions, still  unprocessed, into their container and once more sealed it tight.
+And then, exhausted by day, by the last few days, by worry over her Dot, her *dóttir*, by worry over her boss — "not your boss" the common refrain — she just as carefully replaced all of those emotions, still  unprocessed, into their container and once more sealed it tight.
 
 She could not do it, could not push her way into engaging with these feelings, these emotions. Not yet. Not tonight.