IZON SHŌ

Chapter LI

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SISU

"Extraordinary determination, courage and resolution in the face of extreme adversity."

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Alma

"It is impossible to wake one's conscience without pain. People are capable of anything, even the absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. Nobody finds the light by fantasizing about figures of light, but rather by being aware of their own darkness." – Carl G. Jung.

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Alma liked curtains. She felt that through them, stories were told. As a child, she would usually look at the windows as she went down the street, of the houses and apartments, observing the colors and wondering just who lived in them. Her favorite stories would come from the curtains with colors slightly more daring, o finer embroidery. However, with time, Alma understood curtains didn't only serve to decorate, but also to hide.

The first curtains Alma chose for herself, without her mother meddling or voicing her opinion about the color, the length or embroidery, were placed on the room she went to live in when she began her university years. Her mother didn't want her to live alone, saying it was dangerous and risky, and even indecorous for a woman like her; yes, indecorous was the word she used, together with a like her. It was probably then when Alma began to wonder, what was it like to be a woman like her?

As days passed, and as she went through her memories, she understood that the two words sentence, which wasn't even complete, meant a whole world.

The one her mother lived in.

Alma loved her mother, so much her heart hurt, and it hurt, more than anything, because she felt she wasn't able to fill that deep well of qualities her mother expected her to possess. Many times she cried during her teenager years, when she understood that no matter how good her grades were, or how well she behaved when in her mother's presence, nothing was enough. Alma felt as if she were losing a part of herself in each and every one of the things that were demanded of her, to the point of being barely able to think herself something different from what her mother wanted or expected of her.

And so, one day, Alma accepted the fact that she needed to put some distance between them if she wanted to give her mother a more honest and real love. And university felt like the perfect reason to seek more independence, and to explore her own life. Her mother told her she was wrong, that she would never be better than by her side. Alma wanted to believe her mother was wrong.

That's how she came to live her first year of university at a women exclusive residency. Everything went well, and she even met the person who would become her best friend, even during her life as an adult. However, during her second year she came to believe it was a good idea to explore herself a bit more, and that independency would be a good way to do that.

And so, soon she came to rent a room with bathroom, belonging to an elderly woman who would bring her miso soup and a portion of gyozas every Friday afternoon. She felt cheerful, her life seemed to have a different color, and sometimes she would look at the embroidery of the curtains she had chosen to decorate the place. Alma was in search of the steps that would forever mark her life.

However, a few steps in, Alma understood there were many wills on the road that was her life, something her mother had tried to warn her about. She told her to live alone could be an issue, and she also told her not to wear those tight pants she liked so much.

Those who bore a different will than hers, found her in an alley. They wanted from her something Alma wasn't willing to give, and she fought for it, she fought like never before. However, when she returned to her room, beautifully decorated by embroidered curtains, something was broken inside her. It took her a long time to come to understand the damage she had suffered, for the wound wasn't just physical nor was it only born from abuse, but rather composed what she was as a human being.

From then on, she rarely wore pants, nor did she buy curtains ever again.

Alma found herself at a crossroads. She had to decide who she wanted to be; the victim, or the rebel.

When trying to tell her mother about the violent rape attempt she had been victim of, she found only an apprehensive listener, one she never understood the concrete cause of; either because the woman never truly understood what her daughter had suffered, or because she found it too painful to understand. In any case, Alma never asked. It took her years to finally become completely aware of the burden she had carried since birth, judged for who she was.

A woman.

From then on, Alma tried to be master of her own fate. She didn't want anyone to decide what she should feel or experience throughout her life, and so her steps were always taken alone, as her hands began building walls and walls around the gentle fragments of her heart. Those walls became a shield of the emotional, and so she began to live by purely the physical, fucking anyone she took a liking to, discovering in the promiscuity of it a sort of power over those who desired her. She even came to think of it as something good, more than anything because it allowed her to be in control, and to be in control meant to be safe.

Later on, she would find out that control was a false promise of protection.

Years passed by, her partners ever casual, just like the places she lived in, whose windows remained always raw, and only when she lost count of the casual encounters she'd had, did she consider that maybe, something was wrong. But even so, she refused to see the real issue, and just made a self-diagnosis of being a sex addict. That was her reason for her conduct, and what told every single therapist she went to. The first two, questioned it, trying to dig deeper in search of another cause for her behavior, yet what could they do against her will, as a patience? Something she wielded with finesse too, for in her search of controlling everything, she had developed quite the imponent personality. Even so, she asked to be an inpatient, which wasn't as dramatic as she expected, and many times she thought she felt better. The third therapist, however, she didn't convince with words, but used a rather much stronger argument: sex.

What had happened to Alma?

It was a question that was becoming harder and harder to answer, because Alma had abandoned her inner-self and was living on the outside, on the surface, distracting her own thoughts from the answers she knew would hurt to seek, and to find.

Alma was done with pain.

One night, out drinking, she met a boy slightly younger than her who she took to a hotel. When they were in the middle of foreplay, both half-naked, he let out a phrase that told Alma he was a virgin. Upon hearing it, she felt something strange.

Your first time should be with someone who loves you back. Was her first thought, a reminder of what she expected of life, years back, and that wasn't possible for her anymore.

She came close to leaving the boy there, messy and excited with an erection she couldn't but appreciate; however, she decided that in the same way she had given hers to someone who, despite being a stranger, had been kind, she would be kind now too.

That experience marked her, it dug into a sad and uncomfortable feeling her heart showed her; a heart out of love, a heart that needed healing. She had told herself, so many times, she was a sex addict, that as she sought help once again, that was all she could see in herself.

With time she would come to understand that pain, sometimes, could be so intense it could cloud one's judgement. Alma just let that event rest in her mind, not wanting it to define each and every one of her decisions. However, an experience doesn't touch all equally; these are like landscapes, and the sun doesn't touch everything in them the same way.

In that sort of new attempt of leaving the toxicity that was her life, and after her incident with the last therapist, Alma decided to visit a fourth; a woman, this time. This one, insisted that she should look deeper, to seek the real cause of her addiction, if such was her problem. It was then when she received a card to visit an experimental group of self-healing. Alma understood she'd been given a different key to open a door that was avoiding her.

She didn't expect to find him there.

She met him during the first day of group therapy; he was warmth, and intense, just like the golden of his eyes. At first, she felt attracted to him in the usual way, for he was handsome and she wasn't blind… however it was the strength in his gaze, deep and clear at the same time, what really caught her attention. She tried to calm down that yearning she began to feel, with casual, and unsuccessful dates, not fully aware of how her inner self was starting to awake.

Her interest became an obsession that was getting in the way of her everyday life, despite her casual encounters with strangers, or with her friend with benefits; she just couldn't take the image of the man with golden eyes out of her mind, intrigued as she was by how naturally he could accept the issue of the life he was leading.

Their first physical encounter happened the same day their group therapist talked about self-love. Months would need to pass before she even made the connection, and took the moment as a way for her to keep on with her life instead, thinking that after sex, that desire would become but a memory. Yet, rather than a calm and steady stride, she almost ran away from his apartment, something inside her not quite in its place anymore.

That was the start of something Alma had never known before.

Many of the questions mentioned during therapy wouldn't make sense until much later; until one day, as she went through the notes she had taken during one of the sessions, she began to understand how her time shared with the man of the golden eyes had made her face all of her fears. He didn't just seem warm, he was. He didn't just seem honest, he was. Alma became, in retrospective, more and more aware of how deep she was hidden inside herself, and of how hard it was for her to come out of the darkness she herself had sought, a darkness that the man, after much effort, had been able to pull her out of and truly give her freedom. During those moments, Alma felt happy, felt like herself… albeit she had yet to be able to give a name to it.

What had begun as a casual, loose encounter, ended up being her boy for every single day; she loved him.

It was hard to even conceive it, back then, and only with time did she understand she just didn't want to accept it, because doing so made her vulnerable; not to others, but to her own image of herself. She wasn't "good", she wasn't proper, she wasn't decent. Her life was a free-fall that began with her own naïve idea of thinking herself able to make different decisions to the ones she had been taught all her life, back when she bought her own curtains.

Besides, who could love a broken soul like hers?

That thought was an insidious illness in her happiness, one she managed to hide beneath the layers of her daily life, hoping it would never appear again. That time of vigil, she allowed herself to enjoy it with him, with his honest golden eyes who spoke always with the truth, who showed her the paths Alma didn't know she could take, marveling at the possibilities. Days were but hours when they were together, something that scared her as much as she desired it. Alma felt herself blossoming by his side, but she knew such blossoming was but a façade, like the picture filters people take when they are on vacation; nothing but a front. The layers hiding her inner-self weren't just walls, but spiderwebs with teeth and claw that would destroy him in the process of traversing them to get to her.

One day, he told her a small story, and Alma, during the time that her every day boy could allow her to bloom, she came to understand the man before her had walked his own path of self-healing; just like their therapist had pushed them to. There, Alma realized that introspection was a shitty thing to do, because as she did it, as he pushed her to look deeper and deeper within herself, more she noted how her many wounds would only hurt him if he were to ever reach them.

It was then when Alma perceived what love was, and the way he loved her. The foundations of what she had built to survive began to fall like sand, and so she saw herself naked and surrounded by the flaring pain, still there, still alive, just hidden.

And so, she decided to tread that path of self-healing alone, with the hope of gathering the strength to keep, on the surface, the inner-self she had kept hidden for so long, and that her love, the man of the golden, sunny eyes, were to be still willing to love her once she were able to show herself as she was. She could have asked for time, but she didn't want to tie him down, she didn't want to make a promise she may not be able to fulfill.

And the process of even starting such a thing, wasn't easy.

To leave what she loved was akin to bite her veins out, a pain of alienation that was stronger that anything she had lived until then. Even the incident where it all began felt like something small in comparison, and maybe such was fact that gave her the new perspective she needed.

She spent the first few weeks sick and in bed, with a cold that quickly evolved into a breathing pain that had her laying exhausted for a long while. It was then when she realized a wound of the heart could manifest through one's body; what was helping her live had been ripped out by her own actions, and so she couldn't take in that which was just as vital, as primordial for existing. She stayed in her mother's house during the process, which made self-healing doubly difficult, and albeit Alma didn't believe everything had been said, she came to accept that the woman who helped her grow up, was giving her everything that she knew as love, even if in Alma's eyes that love was biased.

But, whose love was ever pure?

That was a question that was still in need for an answer.

One day, she decided to narrate this process of her life, inspired by the public invitation of people who believed writing to be a kind of therapy, and which Alma accepted so fast she surprised herself. Suddenly, all of the question that didn't seem relevant had a different color. Through writing these words, Alma understood her addiction wasn't sex; such thought had been but a way to silence her lack of love. She yearned to be loved, and didn't know any other way to be close to someone, yet her every day boy showed her a path she had never trodden. Only by laughing with him, running in the rain or sleeping in his arms after loving him, with her heart beating in every sigh, Alma reached the answer that love was a gathering of many moments that helped her grow through someone else's emotions.

And that was what she wanted for him.

She wasn't healed, not entirely. Some walls still remained, but she knew the way around those walls, a way she had learnt to keep open, despite knowing she may still yet fall again, and knowing life was meant to be lived like that: in search of balance. She didn't want to become too obsessed in achieving everything now, because the constant need of seeking endings made of life something finite. The boy of the golden eyes had helped her walk the first steps, his honesty being a great part of her own needed therapy; now she understood what the therapist had said about self-love: only by loving herself, with all her light, and darkness, could she know what she wanted and what she could give someone else.

One day, Alma wrote this: "Among all the things I came to comprehend, what moved me the most was to know that dignity is one of the sensations that take us the fastest to happiness."

Now she felt kindred with what she wrote one day, as she observed the life of others as they walked through a park.

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Short story finished during spring.

Kagome Higurashi, author.

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To be continued.

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A/N

This short story has ended up being almost like a summary of how Kagome lived the story that IZON SHŌ represents. I'm happy with the result, because I think it's a different point of view, and it explains a lot of what she is and feels. I hope you've enjoyed it.

Thank you for reading, and leaving comments,

Anyara

This text is possible thanks to the translation of: Dezart