2024-06-09 - The Carer Speaks

It takes longer still to get used to the Carer being with one in the empty, that one is not all there is anymore. It is still frightening, still too big to truly grasp, so one just has to accept things as they come for now. It is difficult. It is difficult not to lean away and even more difficult still to lean in but one has noticed something new! Again! This kind of curiosity will surely be one's downfall but it doesn't seem like one has much of a choice in knowing anymore. One will know things. One does not want to. One still leans in to ask the questions because those are now the only things occupying the vast empty alongside one. The Carer, it comes back and goes and comes and goes all over again, that is part of what is now unchanging. That is part of what one knows and accepts now.

However, there are new things each and every time the Carer comes back. It broadcasts things one can only struggle to assign feelings to, let alone names to. One was right about being cared for, surely, the joy that the Carer has when she- She! She. She she she. Another new thing to know. One did not have the time to process, there was so many things to know, to accept by now.

It is when the Carer, when She is nearby that it is easiest. Nearby but not paying direct attention to one. It is lovely being in Her gaze, it is so not-cold, so warm. It shelters and makes the vast empty feel less vast, less empty, but it is so overwhelming. So much to know and understand and accept. It simply cannot be done. These moments are easier, not so full of knowing from her that the knowing comes easiest for one. That one can finally understand what she was sending, what she was broadcasting and- and Saying. Saying something warm and similarly not-cold, just like Her. Can one do this too? Surely not, surely, but one has not tried. One would hate to fail in this new foreign thing before one fully knows it, fully grasps what it means. So one stays silent, absorbing and trying to know and trying so so hard to not lean away. It does not stop Her from continuing to speak (how kind of her) to one, or to the empty, it does not stop one from absorbing everything She was saying and trying and trying and trying to understand. It is frustrating, frightening, it is too much. One still continues to do it, whether or not one can stop or not it does not matter, one needs to speak too. Needs to put a voice to these questions, to these horrible things clogging the vast empty and get rid of them.

It is when She leaves next that the first words begin to croak themselves out of one without permission. Without any control over how perfect or knowing of what it fully means for one.

Mother, please stay!