Typical Day Colluding With Your Own Oppression

Lucha my office mate is already in, on the phone. I called out good morning. She nodded and kept on talking to her daughter Jody's counselor someplace in the desert (upstate? where she 's now sent the girl to be saved, (she took Solly's advice right away) a private detention camp to keep your teenage child from ending up in an actual prison.
Lucha kept talking. She'd given up on lowering her voice when I come in. I half listened. I've learned to filter out her never ending phone calls about Jody.
I was still thinking about how capitalism makes you collude with your own oppression and that's the biggest hurt of all. And it occurred to me the abuses at home set you up to collude with your own oppression by teaching you to love your abuser. (Had I been the abuser Machi learned to love? Or did the other boy arise so that he didn't love me, so that he could fight for himself by hating me?)
I looked at the stack of papers on top of my desk. I looked away from the paper right on top, my report on the last two site visits for the meeting at ten.
Abuse went on and on. It didn't make it any better to know that the abusers at home abused you because they were abused. (I hadn't meant to hurt you when I left...I thought I was saving myself...)
I looked out the window. Rain had spattered a filigree onto the soot. Across the street I saw the woman I liked to spy on. She rushed into her window cubicle and threw her briefcase down onto the floor and herself into her chair. She leaned forward, planted her elbows on her desk, raised her hands toward her face
and sank her face into her hands. Was she crying?
Did the pain never end? They called oppression depression. That place where you stay confused. Where you stop being able to know if They are good or bad. If Life is good or bad. If you are good or bad. All life frozen into a fairy tale or a horror story, which? Because who isn't confused by the many ways those who loved us most also abused us the most?

I studied the gray particles on the surface of my desk. They were supposed to resemble something in nature but I wasn't sure what. Was I in a fairy tale or a horror story? Are they good or are they bad? And then, which is the badness and which the goodness? Those were my abiding questions.
That was why I wanted to stay home and hide and never leave my house. Why I was always trying to go back to that static state I attained in my original childhood home, the place where I learned the perfect balance between love and terror, the place where I learned to navigate the specific geography of my abusers' ways to love and hurt me at once.
Soli peeked in and gave us the five minute call.
It was a terrible thing. It made me beta and made others alpha, depending on how we learned to sail the violence tsunamis.

I grabbed my stack of papers. Already I was bored out of my mind.
I'd stayed forever waiting for them to be good again. Or I came to think the way they are, the way they hit or lie, that’s what goodness is. You want to love that much. And want that much to be loved.
They are hurricanes or tornadoes of oppression. Natural human disasters. Humans who become disasters. Humans who are parasites.
Adolfo is a human tornado and human parasite. Every word out of his mouth is a lie. He’s almost a good conman. Because we, I, want to believe, wanted to believe. Wanted them to be good. I was programmed by capitalism to collude with my oppressors, internal or external. How have I gotten stuck with this grifter Machi imagined was his friend, until my checks turned up in his pocket the day they were both picked up on Kill Island? Now Machi's gone god knows where and I can't get Adolfo out of Machi's bedroom.
Don’t feel well. Don’t ever want to go into work after a holiday.