Hell and high water

Engineering runs in that family, usually the more well known kind, their lives filled with structures they’ve designed and built.  Civil, but not really, the father built dams and locks, worked on rivers his whole life.  No mistake there, a man of water himself, he never concerned himself with what holds the rivers in, but rather trying to control and manipulate their power, flow, and force.  

At the mercy on the inside, we work on the outside. 

One generation down, another one, a linguist this time. Analyzing the slippery intent mapped into structure, sound, and meaning. Decomposing, composing.  Years spent reading the braille of depth, feeling and energy in clumsy stick figures.  Feeling the lies and making an artful science out of studying them.

Another generation down, the structure of connection and connectivity.  The central column he’s named science for now is a quest to identify, create, and modify links.  He feels too much, holds too many so he’ll spend his life understanding how they work, trying to make them work for him. 

In the space where time is vertical,  these three live at once, their lives spent running from water, while calling it something else. 

In traditional time, one Sunday this month, one door closed. No more dams, no more locks. Just a river and its banks.  Free.

One day soon, the quest to understand the lies, make them somehow true, make their utterance somehow acceptable, will end. Another kind of freedom.

Someday maybe the scientist of links will uncover what he doesn’t want to know.  He was always free.