Pushed away: Dairy (II)

It expects nothing to be provided, by people or by the wider arrangement, and it has gone one step past expecting nothing into agreeing with the arrangement, on the grounds that a person like this was never going to be worth sustaining. Early abandonment by a mother who was absent or rejecting installed both halves at once, the not-being-given and the endorsement of it, which is why the position carries the flavour of maturity rather than of injury. What it asks for is to let one thing be provided by somebody else, and to leave the endorsement unspoken while it happens.

Nobody's coming, and I've never really thought they should.

It echoes Baridegi, the seventh daughter thrown out at birth for being another girl, who came back of her own accord to fetch the water that would save the parents who had discarded her, and asked for nothing in return. The form implies a task: to notice that she was owed something, and that nobody ever said so.