A Decent Spot in the Cage

The one who sees the cage is the one they bind hardest

Field Report — 5/29/26. Lightly edited, field datum, written from inside. The crossings-out stay.

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(This one swears. The crossings-out stay, and so do these.)

I want to write pretty. But truth shatters pretty.

And you know it. I know it. If you are here for pretty, you won’t find it. Pretty lets me say I want it, and lets you believe it, even as the ink bleeds, ugly and true.

Truth has jagged edges. It holds weight. It has temperature. Pretty is light, gentle, smooth — the thing that never bled in the first place.

Truth enters life. Kicking, screaming, or silent and solid — either way, it’s here.

Fuck. I sound like I’m trying too hard. I want these lines to hit like smack, but I feel like I’m adding fentanyl to break through the high tolerance from linguistic injections we take every day.

Stop it. Stop it. This isn’t a drug. These are words.

But really, what’s the difference?

Words got me drunk. Words got me sober. So which changed my mind?

Ink on sketch paper by Anthony N

That’s not what I came here to answer. I came to write, and now I’m writing about writing, and I still haven’t begun the first word of what I came to say. This was the set-up. The ritual. The build up, then the edges fall away and everything is just… pretty. Hurry. I don’t have much time. I may have lost you already. The hit isn’t quick and it isn’t clean. The hit isn’t quick and it isn’t clean. The quick ones are the tangents — the off-ramp, analysis dressed as arrival. We get stuck there, doing the easy thing instead of the thing. *Cough*

I don’t care if it’s been overused. Which tells you something most people I know don’t catch. I care, deeply. We don’t waste words on what we don’t care about. I didn’t have to tell you I don’t care — the absence would imply it. I told you I don’t care because I care. I told you I didn’t come here to write this, and I am writing exactly this.

Way too fucking soft. Every word is a shape. Every shape is made of relationships. Everything is in relationship. Every relationship can be shaped differently than the words used to describe its shape. It’s pretty to say words are shapes, but what shape? Does it have handholds?

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I’m a fish in a bowl crammed with other fish. Kept in the ocean but sealed from the water all around, outside the glass. When the pressure builds and I can’t swim round and round anymore, it comes clear as the water — there’s no way out. I start swinging wildly. They don’t hold the keys or the blame. So who is responsible for the cruelty? Who isn’t in here with us?

I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want to be handed the job of solving the problem just because I’m the one who saw it. Not when I’m given none of the tools to solve it. It’s telling the starving man to clear a plot and grow food from seed when he’s too weak to lift the hoe.

Who’s responsible here? Who’s responsible anywhere? In a group especially — four salespeople on today, the title so flat no one’s in charge. I’ll tell you who. The one with the most to lose. The one already carrying the heaviest load.

I’m the one who, if I can’t work, fails a minimum of three lives, not just my own. I’m the one who picks up everything — the shift in a voice, the thing not said, the mood in a room before anyone speaks. I’m already tuned to everyone else’s feeling — I feel it, and I move to ease it, soften it, head it off. So I wipe the glass. I stay at the front of the store when I want the back. I watch the floor and who’s on it, so I don’t leave anyone in a bad spot.

On the floor alone. The new kid disappears to the back to play on his phone — still hasn’t started the online training, hasn’t been here long enough to follow up with customers. The other showed up like a zombie, wrecked from partying all weekend. The only other “adult” takes two half-hour bathroom breaks and a half-hour stroll around the mall on top of his lunch. No one stepping in or stepping up.

I already had an exhausting morning before I walked in the door. Up before the kids, then out the door driving them, and then I fought with my fiancée — not fought, that’s the automatic word for two people upset, wanting connection and failing to reach it. Fights imply violence, a power struggle, a winner and a loser. That wasn’t a fight. It still cost me. I show up spent, giving everything, and give more. I know life before children. A bad day then, you could close the door. Now there’s no door.

Here I am, day four of an eight-day stretch, bookended by the kids — no sleeping in, no staying put, still driving to drop them off and pick them up on my days off. I haven’t had a day with nowhere to go, no one to watch, no one to care for, in weeks. When I’m off I’m writing, researching, running a small online store, listing items on eBay — patching holes in the hull, the water coming in faster than I can bail. And here I am alone on the sales floor. I care, I feel, and others lean on me to hold it all. I carry it, and it’s crushing me. I am a person, not a foundation. We hand it to our children, and become the weight on their backs. And who builds higher on our backs, carrying nothing?

This life hurts. It hurts being trapped by invisible fences enforced through language that launders lies in its very ontology. Damn — analysis again. Here’s the deal: I can’t find a person who can understand the words I use to convey my life, what it feels like, what it costs me.

I’m tired. Really, really tired. So are they, for their own reasons. They care too, for their own reasons. They notice things I fail to see. We are a team.

⸻

Amendment

“We are a team.” I lied. I filled the space, rushed for a resolution in the fragmented seconds I penned the words in. You hear a thing repeated enough and it records as salient, with or without your consent. It’s pretty too, isn’t it? Listen to what truth leaves.

What are we really? The captured. Not the newly captured — those still remember outside, still lean toward the door. We were born in here. Most aren’t trying to escape. They fight for a decent spot in the cage.

I want out. Say so, and they bind you hardest. They don’t restrain the quiet patient. They tie down the one with teeth and claws, the one who refuses the sedatives — the one who knows the problem is the ward, not his eyes.

The load is preweighted. The ones most in need of relief are the ones who cannot afford it. They carry the weight because they still feel it. Weight is the only thing that can be carried. Illusion weighs nothing — pretty, and massless, it floats to the top. The strength it takes is beyond reckoning. Imagine if these were the people making decisions.

-Fire tongue 🔥

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This is the cage from inside. Firetongue is where we name what it’s built from — language, and the lies it carries while no one catches them. Come watch the bars come apart.