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<<audio "ochitsubaki-1" loop play>>
umisuzume || 海雀:
[[PDF CH1-6|https://mothlily.love/s/umisuzume_1-6.pdf]] || [[accessibility version PDF CH1-6|https://mothlily.love/s/umisuzume-accessibility-version_1-6.pdf]]
umisuzume transliterates to "water sparrow," but such a creature is untranslatable in english, and is known as the murrelet in that language.
this is a thesis about translation.
this is a thesis about the impossibility of translating trauma.
though nothing is inviolate, I know there is still sacred left.
this is a thesis, and a game, about the ways in which for some of us, our lives are an endless series of violation, and the only inviolate thing is the certainty of that violation.
but, it's also how, despite that, we find ways to live.
[[CHAPTER 1: the only inviolet]]
[[CHAPTER 2: what does it take (it takes for heaven to forsake you)]]
[[CHAPTER 3: the theorem of isolate bird(song)]]
[[CHAPTER 4: A CURSE KNOWS A CURSE]]
[[CHAPTER 5: it is the height of arrogance to believe that i could ever trust a human being]]
[[CHAPTER 6: WE DO NOT, ACTUALLY, HAVE TO VIEW FICTIONAL CANON THE SAME WAY AS XTIANS DO THE BIBLE]][img[https://www.mothlily.love/s/sidebar-tri-small2.png]]a disability thesis on the impossibility of translating trauma
FEYXUAN Nguyen<<cacheaudio "ochitsubaki-1" "https://www.mothlily.love/s/1-mukashi-mukashi.mp3">>
<<cacheaudio "act-2" "https://www.mothlily.love/s/act-2.mp3">><<audio "bgm_sengreen" stop>>
<<audio "bgm_linxue" loop play>>『落ち椿｜｜OCHITSUBAKI』 is a game about how language dies. Ochitsubaki, "fallen camellia," refers to how Japanese camellia flowers fall from the stem whole. It was historically a symbol for beheading.
[SUICIDAL IDEATION TW]
【花白】Hanashiro (White flowers), 【白百合】Shirayuri (White lily), and 【白菊】Shiragiku (White chrysanthemum) are all characters in OCHITSUBAKI who react differently to being immortal and witnessing the apocalypse over and over again in different cycles of reincarnation. They are 天百合 (Amayuri), which translates to HEAVENLY LILY, and in some cycles were known as 悪しき花, FLOWERS OF EVIL, but always holy. They speak in a fairy tongue that has been lost to the KINGDOM OF UNEARTH.
Shiragiku is unfazed and cheery and flippant and whimsical and capricious; Shirayuri is nowhere to be found; and Hanashiro? Hanashiro is planning on their death in 10 years, when the camellias fall. Hanashiro and Shirayuri have witnessed THE END OF THE WORLD before. But no one believed them. Shiragiku has seen many, many apocalypses, but she has never been hurt by any one after the first. Shiragiku has remembered every single end; Shirayuri has remembered none; and Hanashiro only remembers some. Which? Even he doesn't know.
These three are the only ones with the ability to understand each other in their native, long-lost fairy tongue. But just because they have the potential does not mean they have the means. Who will Hanashiro trust in this cycle? Who can she trust? Someone who remembers everything, or someone who remembers nothing at all?
Pick who Hanashiro allies themselves with in this turn of the cycle. May the gods have mercy on these Amayuri.umisuzume || 海雀
tw: rape, trauma, csa, cocsa, abuse
1. the only inviolet
the only inviolate thing is the certainty of violation. some of us live lives of endless violation. we live and die by damocles' sword. it hangs on a thread above our heads and has us forever wishing we were dead. I call it the unpayable debt of being born. the feeling that you should have died in the womb.
a chick that is alive will find a way to break its shell. but a chick that cannot break its shell will die without being born.
schrodinger's egg is the chick that is both alive and dead.
this is a thesis about translation.
this is a thesis about the impossibility of being understood when you have crossed the threshold of such violation you are no longer human.
[[index]] || [[CH1: PAGE 2]]
the thing about translation is that many people think translation only applies to foreign language and also that translation is about Words as communication tools rather than elements of symbolic meaning communicating culture and contextual intent.
when a trans person talks about gender to a cis person, they are translating their gender to be comprehensible under a cis paradigm of what gender symbolizes and functions as.
one might think that a trans person talking to another trans person about gender would not involve an element of translation. in a broad sense, it doesn't. but in the minutiae of how racial, age, class, and ability status intersects and weaves the fabric of gender, it absolutely does.
if every moment of communication even to "similar" bodies therefore requires an act of translation, then what Doesn't?
the reason why many people don't feel as if their most fundamental selves are lost in translation no matter the similarities in identity class is due, I believe, to the social contracts necessary to uphold consensus reality.
the most fundamental law of consensus reality is the tacit agreement that certain things are "real" and certain things "aren't."
[[CHAPTER 1: the only inviolet]] || [[CH1: PAGE 3]]consensus reality describes the way a collective society will agree implicitly that certain things compose the most essential pillars of "reality" and these concepts are INVIOLATE. this involves things such as sex, gender, capitalism, power, disability, patriarchy, race, class, and morality. individuals are allowed a certain degree of tolerance regarding disagreements with the dominant beliefs, but if you stray "too far" from firmly established belief systems, you will be rejected as "crazy and also evil."
threats to power are always perceived as "evil" such as the way sexual abuse victims who don't fit what I call "the innocent purity profile" will be blamed as deserving of their own rape. anyone who threatens the inviolate nature of fundamental belief systems to consensus reality is ostracized as "evil" because anything that threatens the "natural and necessary" appearance of the current establishments of power MUST be rejected on a visceral level.
there are various examples of this. one is the way that most people will blandly agree that Sexual Abuse Is Bad and You Should Support Survivors but react with vehement and vicious rage and disgust at the idea of supporting sex workers with no apparent comprehension of any connection between the two. it appears to me that most people simply do not even consider the fact that if you've been conditioned (since childhood, in some cases including mine) to believe that sex is all you are worth, then engaging in sex work is but a stone's throw away.
[[CH1: PAGE 2]] || [[CH1: PAGE 4]] the stone has to be thrown an even smaller distance when your trauma and abuse conditioning effectively disables you from traditional avenues of capitalist work.
smaller yet is the distance if you are transgender and even further barred entry into avenues of employment, which reduces even further if you are a trans person of color, particularly for trans women of color.
another example is doctors. most people consider the profession of medicine to be heroic. these people clearly have not spoken to any fat people or disabled people, who persistently face horrifying extents of medical abuse and willful negligence. if you are fat, doctors will refuse to treat you unless you magically become thin, blaming literally any conceivable health issue on your weight, from chronic back pain to joint issues to abdominal pain.
no, they will not do anything except tell you to lose weight. and yes, they will give you the same advice to engage in such disordered eating, it is identical to the same disordered restriction as anorexia induces.
please refer to other numerous accounts of severe medical abuse for fat and disabled people available on the world wide web for more detail.
my point here is that if you refuse to believe in the fundamental goodness and moral purity of medicine, you simply become evil.
[[CH1: PAGE 3]] || [[CH1: PAGE 5]] the way that much of these things work is that if you tell people that these things that they want to believe are inviolate and pure and safe and sacrosanct and sacred are actually causing severe harm, they will fight you tooth and nail in an honestly quite violent insistence that you must be lying or are wrong or otherwise morally corrupt and false.
they don't want to live in a world where nothing is inviolate.
unfortunately, there are those of us who do not have the privilege of Not Knowing.
when you disagree with a core tenet of consensus reality, people will simply Reject It as Part of (Their) Reality, either by accusing you of lying or by refusing to believe that's the case or by casting a judgment of moral corruption and evil.
calling someone evil for threatening your sense of what is sacred and sacrosanct about the way the world works is the easiest form of righteous dismissal.
the way all of this circles back to translation is in the way that People Who Know that what is thought sacred and "good" and safe and sacrosanct is actually not inviolate, and in fact gets violated all the time, people like that (people like me) have to translate ourselves, our lives, our experiences to People Who Don't Know (and probably won't believe us.)
[[CH1: PAGE 4]] || [[CH1: PAGE 6]] in a way, the people who know nothing is inviolate, and nor is it sacrosanct, live in "a reality many people don't want to believe is real." we live in a reality outside of (consensus) reality that for a more harmonious society, those in it will deny.
this creates a fissure, a gap, a fundamental sense of translation that must be in operation to communicate. who am I that must know these things in my reality that I also know will not be believed by those in the dominant one? who am I, and who do I have to be, to talk to those who would undergo a cataclysm, an apocalypse, if they were to believe me?
I have to reshape who I am in those communications, those explanations of selfhood and identity, in a way those other people in the other, more dominant reality, will understand.
[[CH1: PAGE 5]] || [[CH1: PAGE 7]] I have to speak their language to be understood.
to speak my own "language," from the native context of my own "(un)reality," relative to the consensus, would doom me to absolute non-comprehension.
I have to translate who I am and the world that shaped me into a meaning that will be parsed by natives of what is essentially another dimension.
if a chick cannot break its shell, it will die without being born. but some of us break our shells only to live with the unpayable debt of having been born. we live feeling, knowing, intimately that our existence is undeserved in a way that can never be repaid.
how, now, am I supposed to explain that to someone who doesn't already know?
there are some things that are untranslatable.
[[index]] <<audio "ochitsubaki-1" stop>>
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[A WORK IN PROGRESS WITH FURTHER PARTS FORTHCOMING]
2.0: introduction
learning another language almost necessitates an element of emergency and vital desperation in the sense that there's a reason why your native tongue isn't enough. why would you learn another language, and well and truly be transformed by the learning, if you felt safe in your mother tongue?
learning another language and being transformed by the learning… it's cataclysmic. it is world shattering. and if you don't need to undergo the cataclysm of ending the world as you know it, then… why would you?
if the world feels safe to you, if that mother tongue's methodology of thinking feels safe to you, then what reason, what motivation, could you possibly have to spend the lifelong journey of transformation that acquiring another language necessitates?
for me, there was and is a sheer alienation and abandonment in my native english that forced me to find a way out by immersing myself in another language and linguistic philosophy.
[[index]] || [[CH2: PAGE 2]]
can you ever learn a language without considering its linguistic philosophy? you can talk the talk but not walk the walk, but… who, really, Can walk that particular walk, that particular path down the dark, unfeeling, but mesmerizing labyrinth?
you don't need to know the way power works in another language if you don't need to know power.
this is true even among those of your native tongue.
I wonder if anyone who's learning "for fun" can ever achieve fluency "for fun" unless they, too, find in themselves with the self-drive that happens when you must take measures to save your own life by providing an alternate path of existence.
you don't undergo a cataclysm unless u Must.
who wants to see the world end unless they've been forsaken by it?
[[CHAPTER 2: what does it take (it takes for heaven to forsake you)]] || [[CH2: PAGE 3]] many people "want to learn another language," but if the depth of that desire is too shallow, it is too flimsy to survive the linguistic / sociocultural / philosophical revolution (and apocalypse).
a lot of white anime fans (and oriental fetishists) learn japanese only on a language level, and they speak it like westerners because they simply never underwent that transformation that requires immersion and reimagining of how another "world" works. they speak japanese wholeheartedly believing in their white superiority and the orientalist mindset of //exotic and inferior//.
I've met countless people who want to learn japanese because they like anime and manga and jrpgs, but they wash out once they realize that the commitment isn't a matter of weeks or even months, but spanning years without concrete reward. it's a lifelong commitment.
when you learn another language, it grows with you. and you grow with it. for the rest of your life.
it's not for everyone.
[[CH2: PAGE 2]] || [[CH2: PAGE 4]] can you learn a language without ever having to touch the glass walls, the unsacred boundaries, the unsacred and the unknowable boundaries, of your native tongue?
you aren't supposed to realize that the world you live in, linguistically and culturally, isn't the only one. the linguistic methodology of thought that you were born into is supposed to be enough. it's supposed to be home. a sanctuary. you're supposed to feel safe there.
can you even learn another language with any intimacy if you've never known the particular sensation of such alienation it becomes a linguistic abandonment?
[[CH2: PAGE 3]] || [[CH2: PAGE 5]]
if you are still safe in your homeland, why would you go anywhere else?
[[CH2: PAGE 4]] || [[CH2: PAGE 6]] I think… I think the only time you can ever really know another language is if you have nowhere left to go.
and that is something I have known with such vicious and vital desperation to escape the confines of my linguistic and literary landscape that…
I ask, can you ever learn another language if you wouldn't die without it?
[[index]] the question is this: what happens when you place two birds who are both the last of their kinds (isolates) in proximity to one another?
they are the only ones left who are able to sing their native songs.
this branches out into more questions, including:
1. will they sing at all? if there is no one of their kind to sing to, will they sing at all?
2. how do you know you are the last of your kind? what makes you think there are not more of those like you somewhere out there, if not here?
3. if they choose to sing (is it even a choice?), if they choose to sing, is it possible for them to learn each other’s languages?
[[index]] || [[CH3: PAGE 1]]領域展開 || domain expansion 3.1: the ugly-throated canaries
birds sing for two reasons: to find a mate, and to defend territory. for the symbolic mechanisms of this theorem, i will be phrasing the former as “to find a partner / companion”
if you are the last of your kind, and you know that there are no other birds like you out there, will you sing at all? some, upon crossing that realization, will never sing their native song again - what's the purpose of singing when your language will never reach anyone?
another consideration to enter the dimension is that birds have the ability to learn and mimic the songs of other birds. but, this mimicry is not assured to be perfect.
rarely is that mimicry ever perfect.
[[CHAPTER 3: the theorem of isolate bird(song)]] || [[CH3: PAGE 2]]I have a dear friend whose grandfather used to keep caged canaries. he taught them to sing by playing the radio and triggering their defensive instinct to claim their territories from the enemy birds they could clearly hear (from the radio recordings).
the grandfather would release the canaries if they sung poorly, but he'd keep them as long as their voices were pleasant. pleasant does not mean exact, however. though i doubt he had such a keen ear for canary song that he would care or even notice if the canaries sung within the threshold of perfect mimicry compared to their wild counterparts.
that is all to say, returning to the isolate birds, while the possibility of the isolates going utterly silent (mute in the same way you can mute a koto string as an audible technique; an aside, but I still cling to the personal usage of selectively mute due to its associations of color and music vocabulary. present, but suppressed, and ambiguously agentic, as technique)...
[[CH3: PAGE 1]] || [[CH3: PAGE 3]]while the isolates could go silent, they could also learn and mimic the songs of the dominant birds in the area. however, while they could be pleasant enough to be "accepted" by the dominant flocks, they could also be so imperfect as to be utterly rejected by the flocks.
just as the grandfather's ugly-throated canaries were cut from his flock and left to fend for themselves.
[[CH3: PAGE 2]] || [[CH3: PAGE 4]]
3.2: what imperfect language do the outcasts speak?
the birds that never learn the dominant language of their kith and kin are cast out of the flock.
a bird that sings "wrongly" could be theorized to be the only native of its own tongue. even if that song is derivative of the dominant, it becomes isolate when the wrong-throated bird fails to be acknowledged by the dominant flock.
if the natives of a language collectively refuse to recognize a speaker of their language as speaking the same language then isn't it, and doesn't it become, a different divergent language of its own?
[[CH3: PAGE 3]] || [[index]] [rape, atrocity of war]
the only inviolate thing is the certainty of violation. where does that violation begin? it doesn't matter; it always has been.
but that doesn't mean it always will be.
I theorize that it takes undergoing severe violence to end up bearing true kindness.
the viet man in a camo hat and workman's boots working at the mob front for undocumented vietnamese immigrants and various other activities but that also operates as a restaurant with the best pho in the state, pho that sings the same notes as my mom's, he saw my empty paper cup of complementary tea and asked me if I wanted to take some home. he was kind and joking in the way of ppl whose immigrant english excels at simplicity when he answered that the tea was "thai green" when I asked him what kind it was, and that "it is good, right?"
[[index]] || [[CH4: PAGE 1]]and, the thing to clarify to any white people reading this is that camouflage is not exclusive to over-patriotic white american men. but, that guerrilla soldiers in the vietnam war also wore it. and, I'll let the front keep its secrets, but I do want to say that, in the words of inviolet truong, a genius and a whore, in the upcoming houseki suigetsu says, "a curse knows a curse," and I think this ex+soldier on the wrong side of a war, whose age (like my father's) suggest he would have been on the cusp of adulthood when saigon fell…
I want to say he knew me, too.
are living creatures ever born kind without having endured… having witnessed the worst of what the world has to offer. can you ever truly be kind if you have not endured such violence as the violet necessity of being silent during every repetition of rape. is that not so far from watching your countrymen be slaughtered and maimed and watching as your motherland became a killing floor, and watching the blood on your hands as you tried to keep your organs inside your body… and watching the blood on your hands as you killed men that could have been your sworn brothers.
[[CHAPTER 4: A CURSE KNOWS A CURSE]] || [[CH4: PAGE 2]]and, in the end, being ousted from your homeland, never to return again. even after all of that.
to escape violence only to enter into cycles of it again. and, attempting still to win heaven, after seeing the worst curses be birthed, and having to burn the bodies of ones you loved and could have loved, how could you learn anything but how to keep the simple kindnesses?
such as a styrofoam cup of tea, "to keep it hot," given to a curse you could tell was a curse even if you didn't have the words.
forgive me, heaven. for what I have done, and what I will do.
but I will set aside a cup of tea for my kind, and those that need kindness. if I can give it, why wouldn't I? (I know what it is to be left behind.)
I know what it is like to leave myself behind.
forgive me, heaven. for what I have done, and what I will do.
[[CH4: PAGE 1]] || [[index]] [rape, sexual abuse, emotional abuse]
sometimes you think about how someone almost breaks your will and you want to cry about it but you cannot bear to make a sound, you cannot bear to do anything at all and in your last act you beg and plead (“incorrectly”) for them to keep their word and keep their loud sobbing fits in the Fucking car but they lied as they always do they cannot be trusted to be true to anything,
not even keeping catshit off the fucking ground. the mud room litter situation was untouched for so fucking long, i had entrusted them to do the litter, they did it without asking once, yet am I the fool to have trusted them do it? Am I The Fool?
they managed the trash room, the mud room, the most untidy room in the house, because they took out the trash every week, and yet the cat shat all over the floor and they didn’t even let me know, they didn’t even say anything, apparently they didn’t even smell or see,
the cat shit all over the room,
[[index]] || [[CH5: PAGE 1]]because they couldn’t be trusted to manage a 2x2 square room that was implicitly entrusted to them because they managed all the trash and they said they’d manage litter and did it even without asking and then apparently never did it again, i would have done it if i had known, i would have done it if i had known
i couldn’t trust another human being.
the lesson to be learned here. the lesson to be learned here is that nothing is inviolate, and there is no solidarity among class lines, and you know? you know what makes curses? curses make curses.
[[CHAPTER 5: it is the height of arrogance to believe that i could ever trust a human being]] || [[CH5: PAGE 2]]what makes a curse? a curse is the violation of rape, of violence, the inviolate certainty of violation, of physical attack, of emotional unsafety, of living knowing that nothing is inviolate.
how do you know you’re a curse?
do you know that nothing is inviolate?
there is no sacred, no holy, no sacrosanct that cannot be very easily and readily violated by another human being. or even those who are no longer human in dazai’s words.
there is nothing, no will, that cannot be broken.
there is no certainty of safety, only the certainty you will never truly be safe. there is no safety, only the certainty you will never truly be safe.
[[CH5: PAGE 1]] || [[CH5: PAGE 3]]how many times do i have to be raped
how many times do i have to explain i have been raped
to explain my silence, my words twisted against me to justify the violence, the violence, the unending violence, and then even my silence being twisted against me in my roommate’s entirety, when they feel entitled to me, entitled to my sweetness, my kindness, my generosity
that they haven’t earned.
[[CH5: PAGE 2]] || [[CH5: PAGE 4]]i was having a breakdown over something i should have expected (sheer utter violation) from my roomie but how can you expect to be stabbed even though you know there’s the threat of violence, even though you know there’s the constant threat of violence, how can you ever expect to be anything but utterly mortally terrified when the knife slides into your stomach?
nothing is inviolate.
you become a curse when you know that.
[[CH5: PAGE 3]] || [[index]] for this, remember that nothing is inviolate, and nor is it sacrosanct.
I used to have friends that assisted in inducing a years-long paranoia that my thoughts were being monitored even just inside my mind. the way that xtians tell children that God knows what they're thinking.
this is to say, does anyone remember the particular era of social media (tumblr/ twitter) where you could be blacklisted and excommunicated for liking a flawed piece of media without loudly damning it for its "sins" every time you spoke of it?
the thing is. the thing is that every piece of media bears the corruption of the society that bred it, which is to say that every High Budget Accessible refined work of Popular Media is designed to appeal to the ruling classes which feed into cycles of supremacy and enforce patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and so on.
[[index]] || [[CH6: PAGE 1]]those purity politics bred only the most sanitized, bland, anti-conflict types of media that have nothing "problematic" about them.
(unfortunately, my entire life has been a series of serious and unending violation, of "problems," none of which resolve neatly or beautifully or bloodlessly.)
the point I'm trying to make here is that a work of media expands far beyond its canonical material, which you do not have to respect or endorse like xtians do the bible, and in fact you have the power to separate the rice from the hull and the wheat from the chaff.
a work of media exists to convey ideas, concepts. those canonical ideas can then be used to create sometimes-silly, sometimes-horny, sometimes-masterful works of writing or art or performance and more. those derivative ideas are still part of the same "body" as the original canon, and they shape the experience of consuming that media.
[[CHAPTER 6: WE DO NOT, ACTUALLY, HAVE TO VIEW FICTIONAL CANON THE SAME WAY AS XTIANS DO THE BIBLE]] || [[CH6: PAGE 2]]those derivative works re-iterate the same story; they exist as translations and new iterations of that original story (which was borne from every story the creators had ever encountered in their lifetimes.)
a translation can be, "I watched jujutsu kaisen and I was fundamentally was transformed by the idea of ryomen sukuna. what makes a human into a curse and not just a curse but the worst?
" I then went on to create sacrosanct (game/chapbook) which was my interpretation of that canonical idea from the artistic language of its original expression into my own."
but, a translation can also be "this is what ryomen sukuna looks like in my art style. this is the result of translating the original art style to my own personal artistic language of expression."
and a translation can be a fic on ao3 tagged with a ship and written totally in english, which retains the boundaries of already existing under the parameters of translation from japanese into the writer's native english.
[[CH6: PAGE 1]] || [[CH6: PAGE 3]]and, a translation can be a fic on pixiv tagged with a ship and written totally in the native language of the canon work, but still translating those ideas into an iterative "alternate universe (AU)" in english terms.
(a translation can be a pixiv fic that asks, what makes a human into a curse and not just a curse but the worst (only to curse your beloved as you die, and then to reincarnate as teenage peers, humans, and to still reject humanity even when you're born into it again…))
as my friend ariel has said, sometimes media changes you like a boiled egg, where you'll never get the raw white again no matter what you do. you cannot un-boil an egg.
and, when you've been changed by a work, that immovable truth remains the same despite whatever other worthless, rotten, scum-coated entrails exist simultaneously in the work that made you who you are.
[[CH6: PAGE 2]] || [[CH6: PAGE 4]]but, the thing is, a fictional canon is not a xtian bible. you can receive its intent and you can reject it. you can take the meaning you want from it because its core purpose is to convey an idea, a concept, and you can pick the rice and discard the hull, and the truly magical thing there is that you can cook that rice and make something worth consuming. even if the hull is inedible.
something I'm learning is to disarm the paranoia engine that makes me believe I am unsafe in my own mind, that I cannot take sanctuary in my own thoughts.
the thing is, no one is monitoring my thoughts inside my mind.
or in yours.
[[CH6: PAGE 3]] || [[CH6: PAGE 5]]the "body" of a work of media that exists in the world, the "legacy" of it exists in the way it's remembered, not just as a collective, but as individuals. a work's legacy is part of its body, the same way derivative works like fanfiction and fanart and cosplay are, the same way the thoughts you rotate inside the sanctuary of your mind are.
the way you translate the canon to suit who you are and your needs and your life, even if that is only in your mind, those immaterial ideas and concepts, that notion of the work, that's what a work is.
a story introduces ideas.
[[CH6: PAGE 4]] || [[CH6: PAGE 6]]a work is its ideas, and you don't have to endorse all of them by caring about a work.
we are not xtians praising the word of the bible.
we can dissect and separate the inedible hull from the rice, which is actually worth consuming. and we can go on to make more things with that rice, an infinity of dishes.
if only in our minds.
but, we can take what we need, what will feed us, and (un)kindly discard the rest.
[[CH6: PAGE 5]] || [[CH6: PAGE 7]]we have the agency to decide what has value, and we have the power to peel away the hulls we don't find valuable. and anyone that wishes to condemn you for "associating yourself with such a work of sin" can very well damn you as they please.
there is more nuance, more power, more choice, even in the tiny decisions we make to ourselves, than people often realize.
so, realize it. start with a grain of rice.
[[CH6: PAGE 6]] || [[index]]