Each living person had an impossible demand from the world, an insatiable desire. It is something they kept asking of others and something they did not ever fully receive. There was always space for more. They valued it so deeply, so honestly, it is beyond any living person to be on par with it. For most people, this is love or peace or some definition of worldly success. I, on the other hand, needed consistency. I craved it—a consistency of experience, of behaviour. It was something seldom granted and often denied. In my limited experience, most people were terribly unpredictable and unreliable. It made my life much harder than it should have been.
Being impossible as it was, I still wanted it—a simple agreement, some obvious pattern that would tell me what I could look forward to when someone offered me a hand with something or a handful of love. For I was quick to form habits, and how we often grab a cup from the shelf while talking to someone or lost in thought, only by knowing how it is always in the same place, I would try to grab at what I was offered once only to find it was not there anymore, that it was only there once, that once was all most people could muster. And so, my life was filled with a constant wave of soft disappointment, kissing the shores of my days, leaving me for a minute, only to flood back in continually.
Like a concession or a lie to tell yourself, I formed a philosophy around this personal pain. The world was not here to give what we wanted; it was only here to give what it gives. To expect otherwise was to have failed in understanding our unique role: what we crave, we are only supposed to provide. In being loyal, a dog often gets loyalty in return. If there was hope for a consistent world, if there was ever such a world in the first place, it had to start with me. And so, in a world that was fatally inconsistent, I was a corner of sameness, of predictability, of habitual presence. And if I changed, I did it as if handing something over after a sale. And these words were the deed, the contract filled with all the intricate particularities—my fine print.