Faretheewell folk...

I heard this tonight: "Worse than being hit, worse than being molested, worse than being lied to, is to not feel credible: when nobody believes you." My stomach tightened when I heard it, and my eyelids began to burn. I listened to the woman that said this to me as hard as I could, trying like hell to take it to heart--trying not to say a word. I had heard her voice crack when she said this to me, and then I heard it solidify again as she proceeded to take her stark revelation and churn it through the structure of her mind. Organizing it in her thoughts. Explaining it away again.

I know that when we say things like this they feel hyper-real through their confession, but that their reality fades and flows with our proximity to their context. But even knowing that she would forget the power her own words had on her, and on me too, I couldn't let them go. I didn't want to. I wanted to hold onto their stinging power as though it were truth, simply. I wanted to take that representative truth along with me, through the colors of my days and nights. I wanted to hold it up to other truths, to look at it again and again through the lenses of separate experiences, and the feelings that are foreign to its understanding of the world. I wanted to compare, organize, and double-check so that I too could be willing and able to explain it back, and keep it at bay.

Cuz you know what? That shouldn't be fucking true, even though it is.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/5/09)