feel free

What if you were to find you were living among people with no moral centre?
It is a great thuddering gap in the thought process of most transigents here. We spend the conscious parts of our time working to the requirements of a professional ethos, and graciously - as much as our personalities warrant this - giving the benefit of the doubt and treating expectations with decency, basically adapting to the censure deflected at us. And to a large extent, niggles aside, this is able to be discussed in bars and on the phone, among those in the know (a solidarity thing, cringe with embarassment maybe, but even then, you know how it is), and it's also able to be alluded to in various ways in describing the untranslatable quotidien quality of the days to the people we are apart from but who know us in a sense that has more to do with shared identity than shared experience.
It's regarded as a medical condition that we share. Something that we have picked up. An easily dissected foreign object residing on our person. Possibly we'll shake it off. And people can quarantine themselves from the carrier, should they determine that the mode of contraction is stigmatisable, or if it is obvious that the symptoms are those that provoke no sympathy, or if they are excerbating it unnecessarily.

Beyond that, the fabric of life here is not hidden, just not prominent, so if you were to come from a place that has outlawed smacking, you wouldn't be informed voluntarily, that it was not the case here, until you walked into a punishment ritual and for the time after, feeling as though some dizzy shadow had started up from inside. And everyone giggled when they saw you had seen. And now you know. But still, in the professional arena, you cannot get clarity on this. It is not blown into life with talk. They do not recall whichever incident and clear it up. They do not speak of this side of routine protocol. You do not speak of it.

And thoughts of Roald Dahl tauten.

And the excreta fixation.
What' s up with that?
I cannot find anything on the internet to say. Like that's out of order.

And the vestiges of unspeakable acts in the public spaces and recreation areas that remain in the daylight in suburban open buildings after a night where you find it easy to believe in the sensationalist exagerations of shadowland national psyche, red and black and with all the latest technology.

That in the daylight, you wake into a blue blue day, and the noises you heard, you can't drag into the new encounters, because maybe it's just you. And what you were doing in that place, becomes the primary question (a domestic place, a place you spend time in regularly, the vehicle screeching from the compound, the reminder in the lobby as you step out of the elevator). And why are you asking them?
And the fear is that it's widespread.
And there is some thought that it is not widespread; that it is extremely abnormal, peverse, and degenerate. But I didn't intervene, you say. Ever.
With prayer.

Why don't you get out?
And give that, as a reason?
They would laugh at me. Or maybe, I would have to sit on the floor, in order to not be taken to a very small room.

In these days, I articulate the good. I keep the wellbeing of those in my day as the basis for our relationship. I try to live all the things that I have faith in. Light and nourishment and peace.