“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” -George Santayana

The traits we inherit are not just brown eyes and webbed toes. We also carry generational suffering, ignorance, intolerance, bigotry. We are like leaves over steeped so the taste is far more bitter than it needs to be.

The biases run deep enough that surface existence has no awareness of their presence, and when light is shone upon them, it is as being ambushed by a monster that was sleeping in the bed next to us the whole time, and not tucked underneath it like we’d been taught.
Because if it’s under the bed, there is a separation. We are safe from the hideous nature that shrinks from the light of day. It belongs to someone else, obviously.

Inheritance is a word that I have always struggled to spell. I am not sure why the weight of it felt so overbearing that I couldn’t even muster the wherewithal to construct it, letter by letter.
Ironically, historical fiction is one of my favourite genres. I love to know all the things that happened before, in gratuitous detail, and perhaps that stems from a desire to know who I’ll be by acknowledging who they were.

I am the sum total of everyone and everything that has happened before, regardless of whether or not that line is direct. The ripple effect of decisions made hundreds of years ago are only now being realized in some instances. In most instances, there is little to no awareness of what influenced what is happening right now.
At some point though, the piper must be paid.
The sins of the father are passed along whether the son likes it or not.

I wandered away from this and I think the reason is because there was a darkeness inherent within it I couldn’t shake for some reason, a darkness that I was hesitant to explore, which is likely just as much a way of protecting myself from paths which wind toward places I’m unprepared for, as much as a desire to not acknowledge those seemingly lesser qualities of my own.

But considering the subject matter, it’s entirely probable I’ll be revisiting all of this at some point in the future, being that history repeats….