Post by Jackie Bariole on Oct 4, 2019 17:03:19 GMT -5
"I think you were sayin’ that it’s not quite that simple, rebelling against the system and shit." Nasrin answered her. Jackie immediately grimaced, recalling at once the path the conversation had been headed in before their one source of light had provided its distraction. Would that she had left it alone though, for Jackie had neither the will nor the understanding necessary to synthesize what she felt on the subject in any sort of cogent philosophy. "I never said it was simple though," Nasrin carried on, as though she could not sense Jackie's regret as she drew back in upon herself, "Just that together we’ve got a lot more chance of doin’ something good then we would alone!" They did, Jackie was forced to concede, but only provided they were working in the same direction. They weren't, and even a casual examination of their core beliefs and their methods up until that point would reveal as much. Nasrin, it was becoming clear, was as anti-establishment as it was possible to be. With each word she said, she added layer and texture onto that foundational fact, that she would tear down the whole system in a heartbeat, if that were within her power. To her, the mere achievements of disassembly and dissolution were, in itself, the ends with striving towards. She held an idealistic and, to Jackie's mind, simplistic view of the world which well explained Heidi's apparent interest in her. Her resentment of authority, of structure, was evident in everything from her caustic vocabulary and atypical appearance, which was so at odds with Jackie's own highly conservative sensibilities. Jackie did not doubt her believes must have more nuance and texture to them which could be implied by such a basic examination of such apparent details, but she did not doubt the overall structure of Nasrin's belief system. She did not doubt that Nasrin, given the chance, would tear it all down without first having something to put in its place, that she believed that solving oppression was as simple as removing the oppressors, and that the act alone should facilitate some fundamental change, some shift, in the way humanity behaved and carried on. How true these impressions were, how true they could be, given how little time they'd known one another, Jackie could not have said, but they were as fixed in her mind as her eyes in her head. Nasrin, to Jackie, was a radical, an extreme. She was from without the System, an invasive force which, despite assimilating into the System as it stood, could never truly be a part of it. She could not see the System as anything other than an enemy, a thing which needed to be unmade. Conformity, cooperation, cohesion, these things were anathema to her; Her approach would always be defiance, not deliberation, her methods revolutionary rather than compromising. She would burn it all down and, in the end, hope that something could be built from the ashes. Nasrin's was a philosophy as unlike and incompatible with Jackie's as water and oil, as alien as Heidi's own viciously pragmatic sensibilities. It was a philosophy couched in the ideal that all people were sensible, sensitive, and reasonable creatures, and that it was a few bad apples, those with power and wealth, who'd hijacked the cultural course of civilization. It was a belief predicated on the assumption that everything would work itself out, if only the hard machinery of society were stripped away, and people were given the freedom they truly yearned for and needed to construct a cooperative whole. Or so Jackie believed. She believed this based on what little Nasrin had shared about herself, her upbringing, and her tastes, and on the prejudice inherent to dealing with someone so unlike herself. Because Jackie could not truly understand Nasrin, and she knew it. There was no frame of reference for Nasrin's beliefs and behavior which Jackie could use, besides that she'd constructed for herself, for the specific purpose of understanding other people. Because Jackie was an outsider herself. Since she had been old enough to notice, if not understand, the disparity between herself and others, she had been trying to figure out the strange, two-dimensional beings she understood to be 'regular' people. Regular in reference to herself, who was so irregular, so abhorrent, that she'd been unable to connect with others long before she'd developed an aggressive, selfish, antagonistic and destructive alterego; That she'd been unable to connect, and others had been similarly unable to connect with her. She did not just believe she was different, but sensed it and was constantly reminded of it, every time she was forced to interact with another person. "Y’know you can look at me, yeah?" The invective was a stab, right into the core of Jackie's being. It made her wince visibly, as badly as if she had been slapped across the face. "Pretty sure I combed my hair and cleaned my face this mornin’, I doubt I look THAT bad." It hurt, to be reminded of how inadequate and abnormal she was, of just how difficult she found it to meet another person's eyes. Eyes which reminded her of the vast field of difference which spanned between them, of the fathomless depth of experience which characterized their distinct lives and how incomprehensibly different it was from her own. Jackie saw in others a flash of that third dimension, that depth, in the cardboard cut outs of other people, a hint of greater depth to a life and consciousness she could only ever appreciate from without. How to express to Nasrin that it unnerved her to meet someone else's eyes, that it made her uncomfortable, and explain why? How to make her understand that, seeing that promise of personhood, that depth of existence, always made her worry, made her desperately self-conscious, that there was no such similar depth within herself? That she was neurotic, anxious, flawed, and uncomprehending of it all. That she really was just the bundle of raw nerve and fear that she appeared to be. There there was nothing else to Jackie Bariole, besides the many, many, many fears and concerns which dominated so much of her life. "You agreed to trying us out, yeah?" Nasrin insisted, "Pretty sure that’ll involve looking at each other." As though unaware of the wedge she was driving between them, "Especially since we won’t be doing anything physical," As though she were ignorant of how ironic, "Gotta have some form of connection I figure." How patently hypocritical it was of her to insist that Jackie conform to the societal norm that was maintaining eye contact, when her own appearance described a rebellion against society in general Jackie stared determinedly at the plot of earth which lay just past her unzipped sleeping bag, her face red like it had been slapped, as a strangely resonant pang of emotion welled up inside of her. A pang of distress and embarrassment, and even something close to betrayal, which seemed entirely disproportionate to the stimuli which had produced it. Embarrassment was nothing new to her of course; Since she'd been old enough to understand expectations well enough as to know when she was not meeting them, Jackie had known what embarrassment felt like. This was not quite embarrassment though, it was not quite the expected shock of regret and guilt which always accompanied one of her many inadequacies being pointed out. It was more than that, and at the same time it was less. It was disappointment and it was outrage. Disappointment in Nasrin who Jackie, despite the past days events, had expected better from, and it was outrage that, after all having actually agreed to some kind of relationship with Nasrin, despite her own strong misgivings, the pinkette would demand even more from her. As if she were somehow entitled to Jackie meeting her gaze. And it was the guilt which inevitably came when Jackie recognized how incredibly unreasonable it was that she should feel disappointed or outraged in Nasrin for wanting something every other person on Remnant was capable of giving her as a simple matter of course. Then, there finally came the self-loathing and confusion at her own inadequacy, as Jackie understood that she was, once again, the one who was different and, therefore, the problem. It was she who could not meet Nasrin's gaze, despite it being something literally anyone else could have done with next to no effort at all. That it was she who had failed to meet expectations, and not the pinkette. "Sorry." Jackie whimpered quietly, disgusted immediately by the soft quaver that had come into her voice, and horrified by the thought of Nasrin noticing how stricken her not-unreasonable request had left her. Not to mention frustrated with herself, for making such a big deal out of nothing, for overthinking and over-analyzing, just as she always did. To show she really was sorry, and to perhaps conceal any further suggestion of what she was actually feeling, Jackie made herself look at Nasrin. She peered into the other girl's sky blue eyes, eyes made strangely luminous by the ghostly glow of her scroll. Quick eyes and clever, whose creases betrayed a certain watchfulness, and hinted at an anxiety behind the more apparent lightheartedness which characterized so much of Nasrin's behavior. It made Jackie aware of the vibrant, inscrutable being sat right beside her, and reminded her that Nasrin was not some impassive feature of the shelter's gloomy interior, but a thinking and feeling being who could observe and have opinions about the strange, ungainly, and altogether abnormal brunette sat beside her. It reminded Jackie directly that she was under scrutiny and, though that was not a detail she'd somehow forgotten, thereby made it impossible not to think about. Jackie held Nasrin's gaze for as long as she could bear, and spent the whole interminable interval wondering exactly what the other girl must be thinking, and what she must be seeing, and whether what she saw met whatever arbitrary standards she had been conditioned to expect. It was agony, all the more so because Jackie was deliberate in her efforts to maintain eye contact which, contradictory though it might have sounded, actually made it much harder than when she managed it without even thinking. "You have pretty eyes." Jackie said finally, and looked away, finally overcome by the need to look anywhere else. After all that, returning to the conversation they had been having, one based on political beliefs and the methods for affecting meaningful change in a world they both agreed was unreasonable and cruel, seemed an absurd thing to Jackie. She found she no longer wanted to debate the finer points of revolution, or even share her own opinions on the subject. The door which had opened to Nasrin, revealing a part of Jackie she did not often let others see, had clicked soundly closed. Had, in fact, been forced closed by Nasrin's own derailment of the conversation by observing that Jackie had failed in her duty as whatever nebulous social co-conspirator she'd agreed to be. Jackie sensed that, in this, she was once again failing Nasrin. That her inability to return to the conversation because of what Nasrin had said was a failing in herself, and not the other girl. Like meeting Nasrin's eyes, it was something which was expected of her, no matter how much she did not want to do it. "What makes you think our wants are the same?" She asked finally, staring intently at the earth ,"Or that I'd even suit the way you want to go about things?" She tried to sound like she actually wanted an answer, like she had actually wanted to ask. She did her best to pretend that she might hear any response Nasrin gave, above the roaring doubt and aversion she felt. That her asking was not simply obligatory, but truly born from some desire to get to know Nasrin better. "Your goals and mine may be the similar, but I think we've quite fundamentally different ideas on how to they may be achieved." Jackie winced inwardly, hearing her own mechanical word choice, but managed to keep her expression as neutral as it ever got. Though then would have been a good time to stay quiet and wait for an answer, would actually have been the appropriate time to pause to maintain any sort of natural flow to their conversation, and though remaining quiet was Jackie's most earnest desire in that moment, she felt as though she could not. An absurd feeling that she must maintain some proportionality between the words she said, the ideas she expressed, and the tumult of thoughts whirling within her head, overwhelmed Jackie then. "What we have now is evil and wrong and impersonal. It has turned people into statistics. There's too many of us to be quantified as anything other than abstract, and so the pain and suffering inflicted upon us can't be properly appreciated. It has rendered the very concept of suffering down to an idea, rather than a reality." It didn't make much sense to say that out loud, for all Jackie believed it, not when it had no real bearing on what they were talking about. She tried to redirect herself, grimacing at her own clumsiness. "What I mean is that I agree that it should change, but I am not convinced that people, on a whole, would like it to. Those who can live comfortable lives with the disparity and suffering kept at a distance may not be able to be comfortable if that distance were removed. If we force people to confront what's wrong with society... What if we're just making their lives harder, instead of making other's lives better?" Jackie's grimace deepened, and some of her previous anxiety and discomfort showed through as well, making her look vaguely ill as she sat there, in the ghost light of her scroll. She hated trying to put her own feelings and impressions of the world into words, always felt as though language was an inadequate medium for communicating such nuanced a subject, even were her own vocabulary not inadequate to the task. "I don't think people want to be confronted with the pain they could turn away from, and I'm not sure that confronting them with it does anything more than make their own lives more difficult. I think most people would rather that policy were changed, without them having any say in the matter..." |
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