Sorry, I don’t think this will work. I know that we have only spoken 3 times and have never really met and that all I know is that you are also very into philosophy, that you have a medium-sized mole on the left side of your throat and that your eyes don’t blink often when you’re thinking, and yet I’m very sure.
Some people have a good nose for second-hand designer clothes that they can resell, or a strong sense of direction in traffic. A radar for plants that do well with little light and water, or an eye for affordable yet cozy B&Bs with sufficient privacy.
I don’t have any of that. But I have, out of necessity, which also applies to Wonder Woman, developed a nervous system that scans the environment, in a completely autonomous manner, for Cowards. I used to not understand my own body, or superpower, whatever you want to call it, very well. Didn’t estimate it correctly. I thought I was in love because my heart started making cannonballs out of thin air, my thoughts raced like rats on a wheel to a non-existent finish line, and I always had to poop when I thought about that person. Now I know that this was a last, albeit nipped in the bud, self-rescue attempt. That she prepared herself, tired but full of dedication, for a new and in advance lost battle because My Subcutaneously Trained Self had already hoisted my new Coward Onto The Saddle with trembling but glittering fingers and had immediately crowned Him king.
She was always overjoyed but exhausted when he fell off his horse as soon as the first steps had to be taken. Left the Royal Queendom open and undefended, just as he had found it. Often, he hadn’t even moved from his spot. Hadn’t lifted a finger.
I usually kept them for a while afterwards, my group of Prisoners of War Without a Motherland. Gave them bread. Gave them water. Gave them love, unasked but forced by the warm, red fluid that bleeds through their Zombielike Flesh. I forgot their cowardly nature because I was one of them. A superlative. The Uncrowned Mother of Cowards. We all flowed into each other, merging spontaneously like a loop of newly created and never drying watercolor paintings.
I took a detour, but what I really want to say is that I can’t accept you into my body because my nervous system has now become the gatekeeper, the queen of my land. And she smells cowardly blood on you. I don’t know how or on what basis she does it, and that doesn’t matter. All I must do is listen, not fight or understand.
My Body is Now a Brave Land. And in a Brave Land there is no place for prisoners of war without a motherland, or never-drying watercolor paintings. I don’t have to apologize because you brought it on yourself. I don’t know how either, but it is the truth. And in the end, that is the only sword I can still take up.
