#86 - Pain Has Always Been an Old Friend

I sit in the middle of this room, this green room, painted by my younger, other self, and rock.  I feel safe here.  That raises my anxiety for some reason.  Growing up there never was a place that was safe.  The old monster could burst in at any time, send a servant, send a guard, send the mother to fetch us, drag us out of safety.

Here no one ever does.  They knock.  The only creatures who have free access to me are the animals, and now, the baby who doesn’t know any better.  I know he’s here because he’s climbed onto my shoulders and is bouncing. What sane person would leave a baby with me?

I unfold and he slides down into my arms and my lap.  If I were on the bed or sitting properly on a chair or the couch he wouldn’t be so forward, I think, but then laugh at myself.  I’m joking.  This child would thrust himself into the mouth of the tiger if he wanted to pet the big kitty.

I examine him again, as though I’ve never seen him before, as he examines me, his fists knotted in my beard.  It is getting long and I’m actually considering shaving it off.  They know I’m not him. It’s just a matter of convincing me that I am not becoming him.

The baby pushes against my chest and I run a finger over his misty, nearly non-existant eyebrows, and then over my own and he giggles.  I touch his nose and find my mouth falling open in an open grin.  You would think I was happy.  He copies me and then shrieks.

A knock at my door and Yolend calls “Ahrimaz is he in there with you again?”

“Yes, and his puppy has piddled on the floor again.” These people give their children dogs young.

She laughs.  “I have a page to clean it up.”

I rise and step over the mess, scoop up the little vermin and manage to open the door without dropping either baby or puppy.

She knows dogs.  The page rushes in with a couple of lidded buckets and a rag, swish up the puddle off the stone floor, dampen the rag with the hot water and soap in the other and give the stone a scrub and a wipe.  All while I’m standing there, looking into her eyes.  She is not my wife.  I miss her. I miss the woman I’m allowed to love.  I miss her.  I owe her.  I load the boy and the dog into her arms and as the page skitters out with the messy pails, I touch her arm.  “Wait, please.” 

She pauses and I don’t know what I wanted to say… at last I manage to open my mouth to talk to the ice bitch Goddess’s priestess wife… um to Yolend… “Next time… next time we spar would you obliged me by trying to land a bruise here?”  I touch my left cheek.  She smiles at me which makes me want to slap the expression off her face because I know how she will answer.

“Sorry, Ahrimaz, but no.  That would violate the salle rules and Rutaçyen would have me do  several hundred pull ups if I actually tried to injure you.  And you would be doing the same for not blocking and inviting the injury.”  She blocks the baby from snatching at her head band and with the child’s fist safely in her hand looks at me intently.  “I do not owe you bruises or scars.  SHE does.”

I nod and step back.  I am so enraged I almost cannot see her even as I close the door softly.  I wait till I hear her walk away, before sinking down on the floor and rocking again.  I can feel the hardness and slight dampness of the floor under me, the verdant breeze from the window.  I feel the press of my forearm scars around my raised knees.

I will not bite.  I do not deserve pain.  She is right.  What am I afraid of?

I don’t know. I don’t know I don’t… I’m afraid that I’m not hurting enough.  That someone is going to show up and make me hurt as much as I’m supposed to.

I and pain are such old friends I don’t want to let it go.  It’s too easy to just let it go, let it be.  It’s too soft.  It’s not right that life should just be easy.  Pain… where are you?  Why are you leaving me too?

Ah.  There.  Pain has always been there.  Now I am feeling bereft of one more thing.  But… what good does my pain do?  It has always been there… almost.  There was a time before pain but my life was arranged so that the only constant, the only unfailing rock under everything in my life, was Pain.

They want Pain to leave me too.