The weight of mentorship is heaviest when the future is at stake. It stands to reason, then, that consideration of the future is the flaw, and one should focus on the present.
I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what I want.
The obvious response is to be here now. I am proven, I might add, and leave it at that. Where do you go during a storm, after all? To shelter, and shelter is not without its toll.
I looked at a hamburger I was eating the other day. I opened it and examined its components. The pickle was appealing, but the rest—ketchup, ground gray meat, cheese—disgusted me, as so many things these days seem to do. I threw it away in spite of my preservative upbringing. An orchard would have been nice. Plums, specifically. A field of plums. A nice picnic in the plum fields in the spring or summer. It brings a warmth to me that has been left behind and neglected in spite.
My desires have been painful. I hit her across her face and she said don’t stop. I have been collecting photographs of her bruised ribs, hips, ass, all of which I will delete except for one after she goes away. Some people collect porn in hidden and cleverly named sub-directories—I collect one photograph representative of the whole experience. And words like these, of course, in a far less collected manner.
I predict I will one day call her by a different name and she will say don’t stop, and I will not, because she will be who I tell her to be and will derive a feeling of control from my attention and dedication of my time to her. Her fear will subside with experience, as it always does. Her fear, her indecision, her hatreds and heartaches—they will all go away, replaced by memories and certainties about who she was and doesn’t want to be.