Pushed away: Environmental Allergy

It takes charge of every parameter in every room it enters, not out of confidence but out of a conviction that the instant its hands come off the whole thing goes over, and where a clinical label attaches here it names a shape rather than a diagnosis. Behind it is a household intensely involved and entirely on its own terms, which handed a child real power without any preparation for it and never once responded to who that child actually was, leaving competence-anxiety, unspent rage and a longing for the mother all running alongside the certainty of not deserving her. What it asks for is one situation in which the hands come off and somebody else is asked, plainly and in words, for what is needed.

If I let go of one detail, all of it collapses. Nobody's ever asked whether I wanted to be holding it.

It echoes Phaethon, who was given the reins of the sun by a parent unable to refuse him, and who could neither drive the thing nor let go of it, scorching the ground the whole way down. The form implies a task: to ask who put the reins in his hands, and why they were not holding them.