MY KITE

How responsible are we for what happens after a word we speak, a choice we make, or an action undertaken for reasons we believed to be right?
My Kite begins with this question and with a more troubling suspicion: the explanations we give for our actions may be sincere without being complete. We may call fidelity what also contains a fear of change, sincerity a necessary truth spoken with a harshness of our own, care complicated by the need to remain needed.
A party remembered many years later, an advantage it would be convenient not to relinquish, an argument in which a sentence remains unspoken, a letter written and never sent, experiences of work and authority: each becomes an occasion to examine the boundary between intention and consequence, between what depends on us and what begins to escape our control the moment it enters another person's life.
The book does not seek a formula capable of separating guilt from innocence once and for all. Instead, it examines the moment when a valid explanation becomes too reassuring, when a moral conviction presents the judgement as already settled, and when the desire to be understood turns into the expectation that others should accept the image we hold of ourselves.
Throughout the book, a childhood memory returns. A hand holds the string of a kite and feels its pressure continually changing. The grip affects the flight, must adjust, can tighten too much or allow too much slack; the wind, however, comes from elsewhere and remains beyond the hand's control.
That image leads to the question running through the entire essay: what does it mean to be responsible when we cannot know in advance everything our actions will produce, yet cannot use that uncertainty as an alibi?
The same question extends to what we pass on to those who come after us. Experience can be handed down, but it cannot determine in advance how it will be understood; a word may be preserved, altered, rejected or remembered for reasons the person who spoke it could never have foreseen.
My Kite is a narrative essay about responsibility when intention is no longer enough, control comes to an end, and what we have done continues to acquire meanings that are no longer entirely ours.