168 - Yearning to be understood

“Here’s the thing you need to understand about healing,” Surya told me after I woke up two aer or so later in his spare room. “It grows faster as it goes. You take on larger and larger parts of the trouble as time goes by. What we are doing now, you would never have touched at the start. You would never have allowed yourself close to it.”

That was true enough. I would never have imagined, let alone made a venture toward, remembering a previous life, for instance. I’d have laughed it off. I remembered also how he had easily talked me out of letting him touch the sword in me at first, and how now he’d run his finger down its whole length. Next, he would move it in me; he’d said so. My stomach clenched and my throat went dry at the thought.

“It seems very fragmented, yes?” he said. “Heal means hale, means whole; you have to make all things whole, from the rainbow of your emotions to your philosophy to the conception in your mind of how your healing has gone, which I know is more fragmented than most of what is in your mind, because it has gone such deep and frightening places.” I signed chalk.

“I did not ask you to record in writing each step at the start, because you could not have borne that—not to mention that while you were still in Arko, you didn’t have time. Even once you were home, you still weren’t ready. Until now. If I ask you to tell me the list, you will have it and then it will be gone again; if you write it, you will still have it even if you forget.” We went into his office, and he had me sit at his desk.

That was the beginning of this book, actually.

I wrote earlier: “In the fire of full-bore expression, one’s suffering is somehow knitted together from shattered bits into something coherent and therefore understandable, forged into something that may somehow, in spite of all, lend strength. In the rage of full-bore expression, one’s suffering is made into story, observable and so bearable.”

I was referring to keening, but the same is true, or perhaps even more so, of writing. Surya knew it. “If you can distill your experience into words on paper,” he told me, “you not only make order out of the chaos you have suffered and suffuse it again with the meaning that was lost, but also you offer your true self to all who read, and they take your part just by the act of reading. You reunite with yourself and with humanity.”

He touched a core of it I had not admitted to myself. There I’d been thinking, I write this for the historic record, or because I think people would be interested, or to instruct; in truth, I saw now, I’d written every word out of yearning to be understood. The other reasons were there; but that was first and foremost.

So I wrote, and the writing did lay it out more solidly as a single pathway I had walked, from the first visit—which I realized, though he hadn’t named it as such, had been a tenar menhu—and my relinquishment, up to the horrific thing in myself I’d unearthed today.

“Well, it’s been never a dull moment,” I said, as I read back my first, bare, list. “If you’d told me I’d get that many scars in peacetime, or be in front of a judge that many times in that few moons, or remember being stream-tested or float out of my body while being flogged or be visited by a spirit creature and become Senahera… Surya, I’d ask you, was it all necessary, except I already know the answer: ‘Everything went as it should.’”

“Keep writing,” he said, “and in time you’ll understand not only generally why it was all necessary, but why each tiny bit in particular was necessary. And went exactly as it should.”

I kept writing.

†

When I’d done as much as I felt inclined, then rested a bit, I went back up to my office. A healing day can feel like a year; to my surprise, the workday was not over. The rest of the world was living on normal time. A runner came to invite me to Assembly, before it adjourned. By her look, cheery rather than contrite, I knew it was something good, or at least not bad.

I threw on decent clothes and went down. They were all smiling, as they glanced at me, with the exception of one or two such as Linasika, who looked as if they wanted to get this over with. The commendation they’re planning, I thought. I hadn’t kept on my spies out to follow the debate with my usual alacrity.

“We deemed it fitting, Fourth Chevenga,” said the angaseye dagra krisa, who was presiding, of course, my sister having recused herself as usual, “that you should be present for the final vote on the matter of the national commendation you will be granted.” My illusion, that I’d made my peace with it, shattered in a moment, as every word of this made me want to crawl squirming under the floorboards.

I will spare myself the anguish of citing the review of the discussion they gave for my information, since I’d missed it entire. It was all the usual arguments you’d expect. As all the dealing had been done, the vote was unanimous: I would be designated Champion of the People, in reward for my actions in the Arkan war, on atakina 71; the ceremony had been conceived and that which they would give me had been designed. I wanted to avoid my shadow-father’s eyes for a month.

Then I felt myself startle, thinking of the date. “That’s the same day as my asa kraiya ceremony,” I blurted, entirely out of turn.

“Order,” the adakri said mildly.

“It seemed deeply fitting,” said the Servant who was heading the committee doing the work, Alosala Kyosha, of Orinyera. “As well, we wished to take best advantage of the fact that many people, both from within Yeola-e and without, are already planning to be in Vae Arahi on that day, which will ensure the largest possible audience.” I wanted to turn into a puddle of water, as then it would be possible to evaporate into nothing.

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