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Oct. 31st, 2015 12:41 amSome of us couldn't quite walk in a straight line but tried anyway, ending up pressed against one of the walls of the world. Hypothetically that wouldn't stop you, since you could bounce along it like a moth or if thoroughly stalled gradually erode a path through its soft nothingness with the pressure of your cheeks, shoulders, hips. But at the wall we all soon run into someone skewed the other way, or into more slowly progressing members of our own team. Most usually into shoals made up of one or the other. And even when a wallpatch was clear for a vanishing segment before and another behind it wouldn't be uncommon for the most annoying of us all, the crabwalkers, to suddenly broadside you, stepping on your feet and almost simultaneously knocking funny bones with you. About the worst way for two people to meet, but I've seen marriages start that way. It's just making the best of it, I suppose, since the sideways walker's journey is done and if you were caught between them and an unfavorable angle of wall yours is too. If one's stuck in your path it's not so bad, since someone else will come along soon enough. You'll be in a shoal, and while there's no chance of knocking them loose your fellow curvewalkers will jostle you out of the corner in time. Put enough of us together and we start to flow like cogs. When your release from the crowd comes when spun all the way 'round you need to quickly say your goodbyes, as you'll now be walking your longest arc. If your step was almost straight this will send you many miles in toward the middle, where the forward walkers are, the normal people, who see their paths well enough to use the incongruities of the ground, the slight dips and rises, the grooves, to change course without falling, and who have thus never seen a wall, often have no firm idea of what walls are, sometimes no strong belief they exist, who at times seem to scarcely understand that there are people who walk other than straight.
If you're like me and have just the tiniest spin to you then you can almost pass, can spend years at a time in the middle. The wall people consider you almost normal, almost blessed, and tend to curse you when they see you. Even when you convince them to say your name they just make that a curse. They have a sort of oral list, recited when they sleepwalk, of all those they curse, and they sleeplisten enough to learn these from one another, so you learn to withhold your name so it isn't ruined for weeks worth of walking. But genus-level curses sting enough. You're not quite welcome.
In the middle it's no better, in the end. They walk together hand in hand there, something no one at the wall would ever do, except for rare, reviled traffic-jam dyads of retired crabs (once in a lifetime you might hit a triad - I haven't, but hear that escape can take months). If you keep a careful eye on optics or find a deep enough, favorably angled groove you can seem to belong, can go with them a ways through their fields of tall, shining, proud-kerneled corn, can hear their straightforward talk of open, sunlit days ahead, untroubled days behind. Your mouth will bleed inside for how you force your smiling face to give no hint of the crumpled or sunken expressions all have at the wall, that shadow that spending one half of each day in a shadow has never not cast. If you can just make it work long enough the moment you long for, but shouldn't, will come, when a tall, straight-gazing, cornfed friend you walk with takes your hand.
If any of us could ever stop that moment might be yours forever. But not even those of the middle know how to stop. At the wall you're often stopped, but that's of course very different. That moment only a sidewalker would ever want frozen. (None seem to know just what's up with those people.)
No, you go on and the terrain shifts and you walk right through your wedding cake and injure the lap of an in-law and slide down one side of the hall and slump out a revolving door and destroy a bit of garden and wander like a drunk down the hillside and stomp through a corner of pond and lose a few hours in the park until deep in the night when your foot hits what must be the wall.
If you're like me and have just the tiniest spin to you then you can almost pass, can spend years at a time in the middle. The wall people consider you almost normal, almost blessed, and tend to curse you when they see you. Even when you convince them to say your name they just make that a curse. They have a sort of oral list, recited when they sleepwalk, of all those they curse, and they sleeplisten enough to learn these from one another, so you learn to withhold your name so it isn't ruined for weeks worth of walking. But genus-level curses sting enough. You're not quite welcome.
In the middle it's no better, in the end. They walk together hand in hand there, something no one at the wall would ever do, except for rare, reviled traffic-jam dyads of retired crabs (once in a lifetime you might hit a triad - I haven't, but hear that escape can take months). If you keep a careful eye on optics or find a deep enough, favorably angled groove you can seem to belong, can go with them a ways through their fields of tall, shining, proud-kerneled corn, can hear their straightforward talk of open, sunlit days ahead, untroubled days behind. Your mouth will bleed inside for how you force your smiling face to give no hint of the crumpled or sunken expressions all have at the wall, that shadow that spending one half of each day in a shadow has never not cast. If you can just make it work long enough the moment you long for, but shouldn't, will come, when a tall, straight-gazing, cornfed friend you walk with takes your hand.
If any of us could ever stop that moment might be yours forever. But not even those of the middle know how to stop. At the wall you're often stopped, but that's of course very different. That moment only a sidewalker would ever want frozen. (None seem to know just what's up with those people.)
No, you go on and the terrain shifts and you walk right through your wedding cake and injure the lap of an in-law and slide down one side of the hall and slump out a revolving door and destroy a bit of garden and wander like a drunk down the hillside and stomp through a corner of pond and lose a few hours in the park until deep in the night when your foot hits what must be the wall.
