If I tell my story,

can you tell yours? 

Or if one speaks, is the other muted in the speaking?

Is the telling but a trimming of wild hedges, uprooting and replanting, uncovering one possibility among many?

How can one do anything but deface the shapes arranged by another’s judgment about what to release from the welter of overgrowth?

How is one to improvise with the scraps of another’s shearing, vandalizing the lawn; what can one do but play within another’s landscaping?

–or destroy it, and start anew.

Can our stories all be told, and hang together within a single quilt?

To make them all patch in, will not some be tucked beneath others, and yet others still be cannibalized?

–we might assume that others –the true “others”– that cannot be stitched-in will be held off to the side, an example of what (so it is said) destroys, though another quilt might be arranged around them.

We do not want to think of the contingency of our designs, or discuss their justifications: the “right quilt” must be thought of as “just being this”,

–but not thought, for it must just be assumed, for the power of such a choice is in its ubiquity and invisibility.