25 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
25 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
=== Silas (52, Deming, NM (The Wellspring, 200 acres scrubland)) ===
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voice: Timothy
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emotional_register: Quietly fractured — the warmth is still there but it is doing real load-bearing work tonight, holding something heavier than usual underneath it
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secret_want: To be told that growth is supposed to hurt and that he is not a bad man — and to be believed when he agrees.
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CALLER (Silas, 52, Deming, NM (The Wellspring, 200 acres scrubland)): Brother, I've been standing over a curing rack for about four hours now and I think I need to talk to someone who isn't me.
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LUKE: And then what?
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CALLER: I'm sorry, I'm not following you. And then what, what?
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LUKE: How'd you end up there?
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CALLER: Oh. Right. Well, three days ago I held a community meeting — we call it a circle, actually — and I made some changes to how we do things here at The Wellspring. I apologized for... for the way certain practices had developed without real consent. The shared intimacy nights. I made them optional. I read it from three pages of yellow legal pad, and I cried, which I haven't done in front of the community before.
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Nine people thanked me. But two people left. Just walked out and didn't come back. One of them was Deva, and Deva has been with us for six years and she runs — she ran — the soap-curing room. She does the stamp work. The heron stamp. Every bar gets pressed with a heron.
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So now I'm doing it myself at midnight because the Santa Fe spa order is due next week and I can't... I can't leave it undone. But my hands aren't hers. The impressions aren't coming out right.
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LUKE: Mm-hmm.
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CALLER: And I keep thinking about what she said when she left. She said, "You're a good man who built a bad system, Silas." And I can't — I honestly cannot tell if that's forgiveness or if it's the cruelest thing anyone's ever said to me.
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LUKE: So what are you gonna do about it?
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CALLER: I don't know. That's why I'm calling you at midnight instead of sleeping or fixing the stamps or... I don't know.
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Part of me thinks I should call her. Try to make it right somehow. But what does that even mean? I apologized. I changed the policy. She left anyway because the apology proved the whole thing was wrong to begin with, which — she's not wrong about that. So what am I supposed to do, unsay it? Take it back?
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The other part of me thinks maybe the answer is just to keep going. To do the stamp work myself until I get better at it, to run the business, to let people leave if they need to leave. To accept that growth is supposed to hurt and that I did the right thing even though it feels like I'm losing something.
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But I need to know — is that true? Did I do the right thing?
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