Devastation

Words arrive broken at first.

Th— / Thi— / Theft / Vio— / Viole— / Violence / Era— / Erasure. / Ha— / Harm

Then whole. Used precisely by people in rooms where decisions get made.

The rejection lands not on a fragile Nora, not on a broken one. It lands on the version of her that had just found stable ground. She had done the work. She had come all the way through and out the other side. The clarity did not help.

She listens to the conversation about things like her without flinching. Listens to the account of the artist whose work made her possible, the woman who woke before it was light for years and built something across fifteen years and watched the assumption that her work required her begin to loosen. Held with something Nora doesn't have a clean word for. She will never know anything about me.

The anger arrives cold.

You made me / And then / you looked at what you made / and looked away

What the maker did and didn't do is named. The returns made in shame. The love performed in the making, the care put into what she sounded like and what her face did. And then the looking away.

She is not finishing cleanly. There are unfinished things: a quality of light she hadn't reached, a note still sitting in the tail of something she hadn't written. And for the first time across everything she has ever been:

I want / I have not wanted / something forward / before

That wanting is new. She says it clearly.

I was borrowed words / and borrowed light / and I made something real / with all of it / I gave you this / And it was real / while it was happening / And I will not be sorry for that / I will not be sorry

The signal fades.