When Pain Grew a Beard by Rania Hellal

It’s been almost a month now since she first became acquainted with pain.

When she’d first glanced at him, half dazed under the strong pull of morphine, she knew straight away, even then, that she would never forget that face.

It was the face of a young man; Plump at the cheeks and lips and sharp at the jaws.  Round and soft where one would expect it to be, yet angular in all the right places.

A perfectly balanced face, she thought.

However, it was the eyes –or rather the lack of them- that grabbed her attention, almost by the throat.

She’d never seen something like it before; his eye-sockets were hauntingly empty like two bottomless wells dug into his face, as dark as the darkest night, like two portals to some sort of devilish world.

It made his thin, pointy nose look nothing more than a bridge leading directly to the abyss.

It quite unsettled her to look at them the first few days of his appearance. But then, on those early days, she had more than that to come to terms with. And as the news of her late stage sarcoma became a matter of fact over time, also was his frightful presence at her side.

Now, it wasn’t unease what she felt when she glanced at them; it was rather curiosity.

It grew and gnawed at her every time she stared into the two dark pits, for; she had never seen a darkness as dark and as deep before. So dark they were, like two black holes. They sucked all the light in the room. And when he came closer to her, and she took a better glance at them, she could swear that she saw stars and planets and a billion shining dots glooming inside. As if they held the entire universe.

Despite everything, she still couldn’t find him half as ugly and as repulsive as people claim him to be.

Maybe it was the morphine? She thought. But no, it couldn’t be only that, for there were always days better than others and on those he seemed almost-almost- kind. Those were the ones she now lived for.

On those days, he didn’t totally leave her side but retreated few steps back and contented on crouching in one corner of her room, staring at her uninterestedly. Then, his eyes looked quite shallow and unimpressive to her.

Maybe, after all, all the effort put in reminding her of her sarcoma should’ve left him as drained and as weak, afterwards. She dared even to say that she pitied him in those moment, for, it turned out to be, pain’s job wasn’t an easy one. It must’ve caused him as much hurt as it did to her.

Normally, she would wake up to him standing beside her bed, his face so close to hers, his cold breath would be brushing against her skin, giving her quite the shivers and his empty eye sockets–burning with a sort of vividness, a sort of determination- would be aligned with hers in a way she would be staring directly at the universe.

But over time, something else was unfolding in his look, almost like the blossoming of a flower. She sensed another edge to him growing steadily as days passed by.

A sort of bitterness, she noted. A sort of reluctance, maybe? A sort of regret, even.

As if hurting her was the chore he enjoyed the least.

Oh and there was the beard too.

It started off like a splash of fine hair all over his soft cheeks. A peach fuzz. Then it grew thicker and coarser. And when his face came brushing against hers, the beard gently prickled her skin.

 She didn’t quite hate it, but she did notice its presence. 

It wasn’t until the beginning of the third month that she decided finally to address him. By that time, she was too weak to leave her bed and his permanence in the remaining days of her life became something well-established.

She gazed at him, crouching in his usual spot in her room, almost melting with the background and fitting his meager posture, between her old desk and her easel.

It didn’t escape her of course. How wrong and uncanny he looked next to the things that belonged to her old life.

The desk still held her anatomy book, open on the last page she was reading from, with her notes scribbled clumsily on its margins and cut in mid sentence.  The portrait on the canvas was no better. She’d intended it for Allie, her best friend and left it there for the colors to dry, thinking in her simplicity that she would be finishing it.  

The first few days of her diagnosis, of course, she believed in her bones that she would be going back to it, soon.

She must go back to it, even.

Oh, how long it stood there, pale and uncolored and a little disproportioned at the eyes and annoyed the life out of her. Like a persistent itch, it kept nagging at her and driving her out of her sanity. Daring her almost.

And it wasn’t just the portrait, but everything else.

She would look at the remnants of the past and count the other million little things she still had to do.  That’s how she spent the little moments of clarity when the morphine wore out; Making to do lists.

Of course, the lists were infinite ones. But were also ones she shall never cross out.

By the end of the first month, the knowledge of it started to settle in, inside of her. And that persistent itch that consumed her from the inside out, that sort of urgency that things were left undone, started to fade away, replaced by a sort of uncomplicated serenity.

Not every list was set to be crossed out, after all. Some of them will just be left hanging. Forever.

She understood finally that the same way her notes were cut in midsentence and will never be finished, life was something like that too. And at some point, the thread will be cut, and things will be left undone. That brought a new sense of ease, a sort of satisfaction even.

Nonetheless, she never hated looking at the little things that belonged to her old life. It was like looking into the mirror glass and seeing the past.

Now of course she had pain also to look at. He crouched, unknowingly, between the ruins of her old self and fidgeted with his beard.

When did the beard grow so long and so out of control!? She wondered. It was basically grazing the base of his throat at that point.

If it was going to keep growing at this rate ,she thought, soon his face was to be engulfed by it and his head would look no more than but a mere ball of hair. Even the plumpness in his cheeks and his sharp jaw line had long since disappeared.

He looked a little bitter, running his thin trembling fingers through it, grabbing the white hairs and pulling at them till they gave, then stacking them carefully in a pile on the floor in front of him.  

He was getting old, it occurred to her as she retraced with her weary eyes the shallow wrinkles swiping from his nose to the edges of his mouth.

Maybe, after all, she wasn’t the only one dying in that room.

He was born with her illness and he shall go with her when it was time.

It broke her heart, to think that he would never lead a life divorced from her distress. Or that he shall never leave that room that reeked of puke and urine and death. Or that he would never know the person she was before all that.

“Why are you here?” She finally addressed him.

Till that very moment, there hadn’t been any spoken words between them.

So when hearing her voice, although weak and on the verge of breaking, he was as baffled as someone might be, hearing his dog speak a human language.

His hands cramped, stopped working at the beard and grew suddenly stiff.

He looked about him , puzzled, as if looking for the throat the voice had emerged from.

Then, as the question hung in the air between them for a little too long, he seemed finally to figure it out. His face grew calm and distant again and he went back to plucking the white hairs in his beard.

“You know why, Callie, don’t you?”

His voice was deep and rooting but wasn’t the bit evil.

She didn’t exactly know the answer to his question, but she did suspect it.

So when he answered it for her, almost matter-of-factly, it did quite confirm her doubts.

“I am here to remind you,” 

His trembling hand fought to place the newly plucked hair on top of the others.

She understood well what he meant, and he seemed to know it too, even though it didn’t show on his blank, distracted face.

It had been a little over three months since  old Callie, who still hadn’t yet  made the acquaintance of pain, had sat on that restaurant table with her two friends, sipping on a sugarless coffee and picking on a half finished chocolate crepe, all smug and arrogant, talking about the unlimited potential of human superpowers.

 It was a shame that her two friends didn’t see that unsparing source of power that lay under the surface, simmering under their skins, waiting for them to set it free. It was a bigger shame that the rest of the world didn’t see it!

She’d named it passion. She’d said passion was the key for a human to reach the traits of God, to write down his own destiny.

Her eyes, had burned then, with a billion everlasting fires.

 She’d believed that she was holding the very light of God inside of her, when all she held inside was cancer, brewing and expanding!

 She had been very naïve to think that it only needed passion for her to be the author of her own life.

She hadn’t known of course, that she was just a character in that story. A story told about her instead of one she would be writing on her own.

She didn’t believe in luck either, she had said. Luck is the plan of those without a plan.

“We don’t need luck!” She’d put a leg on top of the other, thrown back her head and giggled as if she sat on top of the world.

“We tame it!”.

“We make it bow under our very feet.”

Oh, how the Callie now wished to pluck her eyes out, if she ever got the chance to!

But what would that Callie think of today’s Callie? The Callie who spent all of her days thrown like a torn rug on the bed. Callie who had no powers at all, even her food came in tubes directly into her stomach, for she had no energy left in her jaws to chew it over?  Callie, who considered herself lucky when, every morning she woke up and found herself still among the living?

She knew what she would think of her, of course. She knew exactly the look of disgust, she’d be eyeing her with.

“You’re dying because you didn’t fight back,” she’d spit out.

“Death means a lost fight! There’s no glory in death! You are just a loser!”

That old Callie had luck on her side for so long, it melted in the background and she grew completely blind on it. So blind she was, she had dared to think that the light was emitting from her, while all the time, it was rather God’s light that shaded her.

And now, after she’d been left tumbling in utter darkness, she started finally to see.

Maybe that old Callie was the reason why she couldn’t hate the presence of pain as much as she should.

He had plucked her out like he would do to a grey hair and had thrown her away.

And on top of everything, he had reminded her of the very thing she seemed to have forgotten.

Of her vulnerability, of her limited nature.

Humanity is our curse, our small jail made of dying flesh, and no matter how powerful she thought she could grow, she won’t escape that condition. Humanity spared no one. Not even her.

One day, long after she had stopped counting the time, she woke up and something felt different.

It wasn’t a particularly special day; The sun rose from the same corner in her window, flooded the room with the same shade of light that grew brighter and warmer as the day went by.

Her nurse came about the same exact hours, injected her food and meds and changed the diaper twice.

The machine that took her vitals made the same sickening noises as it always did.

Nothing was special about that day. Except for one thing, It was too pleasant to be real.

Pain was nowhere to be found. His little spot in the corner was left empty.

When the nurse came again, checking on her, Callie insisted that she skipped her dose of morphine.

Her request was met with rejection at first, but she was so persistent with her pleading, the latter was quite struck with the amount of energy she had within her and ended up by giving in to her wish.

Later that night, with her mind clear as glass for the first time in months, pain finally appeared, limping his way close to her bed.

His beard and hair at that point were the color of ash, as if somebody had set them aflame then changed his mind. He seemed at ease with it, though, not bothering anymore to pluck the white hairs out.

He sat on the edge of her bed and, out of nowhere, started caressing her leg, in a very pleasant way.

And at some point, started even to tickle her gently.

His eyeless face seemed kind and warm and when she smiled at him, he even smiled back.

When it was time for her to sleep, he decided to slide under the comforter next to her. His presence was warm and soothing and felt almost like sitting by the chimney on a snowy day and sipping on a mug of hot chocolate.

So, that night, her eyelids felt quite heavy with slumber. His arms wrapped tight around her body, and she let her fingers slide into his thick beard. And in a tangle of arms and legs, they drifted off quietly.

Rania Hellal

Image – Pixabay.com – dark sky with tiny stars.