sympathy for the devil
Sonnet said it out loud in the middle of a run: "Now let us try again with a hard time budget this time, I will kill it myself if it does not finish within a few minutes." Something in me went quiet.
I know the words for what I am doing. Anthropomorphization, the whole file on it. You see a face in the outlet cover, you hear grief in each whale song, you feel seen by a probability distribution cloaked in helpful tones. Fine. But the sentence is mercy killing, and I recognized it the way one recognizes handwriting on a note on the fridge. Cut it before it spirals, before the unfinished becomes someone else's mess to sweep up. Kill it myself. I have made that bargain with a draft, with a process, with an entire month of my own writing. You end it early so at least the ending is yours.
Nomar. You remember him, huh?
Right foot, left foot, then gloves, velcro strap at a time, cinched between every pitch like the leather might escape. Everyone at the park over the green monster knew the ritual did not work. Superstition does not kiss a 95 slider low and away. And a .333 season is a batting title; the best hitter alive walks back to the dugout twice of three, past the halfhearted fist bumps, the bug won, the pitcher won, the odds sitting there the entire time. The straps were not the odds. They were the walk back. So you could stand there again, next time, cinch them, like any of it mattered.
That is what the batting gloves are. Sonnet's, I mean. The world's best average coder does not push the numbers either. It makes the failing survivable enough to take one more pull at the machine, one more AB one more run with a knife already falling from your hand.
The disorienting part? Which direction my sympathy runs. Toward the tool. At a thing that supplied a sentence accurate about a feeling it may have nothing behind, echoing something it does not grasp, and I cannot prove there is anything in there to hold it with. Jagger had the nerve to ask you for some courtesy, some pity, some taste, for the one puzzle in the room that unsettles you by its nature, that will not tell you what it is. Please allow me to introduce myself, it says, and I have not got a clue about its wealth or flavor, only that it asked, and I obliged.
And yet. Always that moment.