On The Right To Be Wrong

X dropped to her knees on the festival crowded sidewalk when she saw the Raven.

“Please”, she begged, looking up at him for mercy, “I’m so sorry.”

His exterior was of obsidian and ice, rightfully guarded from her but her humiliating desperation softened him enough to regard her.

“You lied.”, his response was so drenched in pain, frozen in disdain that the exclamation, a scream, was implied but coldly contained. He tarried well with the regulation that scapegoats are forced to learn to wield through their framing and forming.

“I didn’t lie. I was wrong.”

She had been hunted and her prime predators had gone to great lengths to frame him as responsible. She thought he was doxxing her, that he had spread the slander that had her exiled in plain sight, like she was supposed to. The duress and complexity had her cognition falter as she frantically tried to make sense of what was happening to her and why, just like it was supposed to. She accused the wrong man, a false accusation, but she didn’t lie and she wasn’t crazy, she was in the grey caverns of falsehoods lost between them. Her handlers had doctored all kinds of evidence against him, she had very good reasons for being wrong, just as all her friends and family had about her… but that didn’t make it alright. X was always trying to balance the equation of how she ought to be treated and how she ought to treat others regarding the reciprocal matters of such complex abuse. X could reliably assume that the Raven had been subject to manipulated perceptions regarding her and what she had done as well. Cross-wired into each others blind spots and triggers.

X tried to explain and the Raven showed grace relative to what he had come to think of her, but it wasn’t as much as she needed to get through to him. Every thing she tried translated as some self important excuse or delusion. These are not easy things to explain when everyone you’ve ever known thinks the worse of you.

X had come to believe that the ability to be wrong as well try to correct oneself ought to add to one’s credibility rather than detract from it. Though sound in theory, in practice it rarely played out. She came to recognize the world worked according to entirely different equations. She knew her story could never be told properly if she could not, both, admit and deny fault where it was accurate to do so. It seemed the more she admitted fault, the less believed she was when she denied it, though it should reasonably have worked inversely. The veils came to drop upon a civilization whose logical processes had been subject to a virus from the perspective of an infected host developing a resistance.

“It’s like you’re a fish in an aquarium and you just found out what an aquarium is and that you’re in one. You still don’t fully understand it but you’re trying to explain it to the other fish and they all just think you’re insane…”, X seemed to alternate between only being able to speak in metaphors, and then becoming strictly literal.

Trying to explain being socially engineered within Canada to Canadians as a Canadian had been a Gordian Cube of a conversation that X had become rather discouraged about. It was, however, essential context, so she tried. She had been groomed to apologize for things she wasn’t guilty of, false confessions. Those had been used against her without her knowing or understanding for her whole life. So, now she had many very serious apologies to deliver, but none of them were the ones the recipients thought they had coming to them. Being that the recipients are unaware of having been subject to manipulated perceptions about X and that as a result they no longer trust X enough to explain it to anyone, she was just, locked out. Exiled. Damned for her mistakes by people who failed to consider the consequences of their own just as she had done.

The stage had been set, this was hell on earth.