The Suffering World

Originally posted on r/writingprompts in 2016

Prompt: You wake one morning to find you have developed the ability to eliminate any amount of suffering in the world…by transferring it to yourself.  You can never die, but every bit of sadness and pain exerts itself on you as if it was your own.  Today you decide to take on all the world’s suffering.
​
What is a world without suffering?  What is a person without pain?  Can our blood still run without a wound?

I remember the day I learned I had changed.  It was a warm spring morning.  I was awakened by the sounds of my neighbor beating his wife in the unit below.  I had opened the bedroom window the night before to smoke and never closed it.  His yells and the sound of his fist shook through their windows and bounced through mine.  The clouded morning sky was a blue-silver and the light coming into my apartment turned everything grey.

The grunt that preceded the fleshy THWACK of a fist hitting a body and the subsequent groans that followed were a regular occurrence.  I had moved into Riverside Plaza less than a year ago and I’ve had cops come down my hallway no less than 15 times.  I had called them a few times myself.  This apartment complex is no safe place, but it’s cheap.  A series of grey, Brutalist towers seem a fitting place for the kind of isolated, hidden violence that occurs here.

A door slammed downstairs and I could hear a person quietly sob.  I don’t know what was different about this than any of the ugly times before where I sat on my couch or lay in my bed and ignored it, pushing it precariously to the edge of my mind.  It may have been the way the wail hit my ears, echoing outside before coming into my bedroom.  Or maybe all of the ignored moments finally hit me, piled too high.  I had been that body gasping on the floor, a child batted around by a grown man’s hands.

I got dressed and dug through the locker on the end of my bed, grabbing the rough, wood handle of my old baseball bat.  I wasn’t about to get my ass kicked in this damned place.  I padded down the hallway to the staircase, down a flight and into the hall below mine-- carpet worn thin beneath my feet, cool and hard.  I walked up to the door muffling the person’s cries.  I rapped hard against it, a pair of pastel Easter egg cutouts hung askew.  I could hear nothing but the hurt woman behind the door.  I shoved it and it swung hard against the wall.

The woman pulled herself up off the floor, startled.  Recognizing me, she promptly slid back onto floor, pulling her knees into herself.

“He isn’t here.”

I let the bat rattle onto the hardwood and walked to her.  Her face was pulped with shades of red and pink.  Skin pilled up on her cheekbone, sponged in angry red.  Deep crimson blood flirted between viscous liquid and flakey solid under her nostrils.  A split ran blood from her lip.  It was hard to see the state of the rest of her under her clothes.  I had to ask a stupid question.

“Are you alright?”

As I stepped to her and crouched, I seemed to enter a cloud that surrounded her.  The atmosphere changed around us, or maybe my perception of the atmosphere changed.  There seemed to be a pull of energy from me, but with an exchange from her.  I wasn’t being depleted of something, only filled with more of something else.  

Her lids brimmed with bright new tears and they rapidly fell down her battered cheeks.  She gulped and gasped for air.  She shook.  The pain went so much farther than the beating her body took.  I squatted next to a person whose spirit had finally been punctured.  It no longer stretched around the pain; it was pulled to its capacity and then given another yank.  Broken.

I found myself crying at her feet.  There was nothing I could do.  But so much I wished for her.

“What can I do?”

She put her hand atop mine, through a coarse voice she managed, “There's nothing you can do.”

I was practically pleading with her.  The energy continued to spin between us.  I couldn't focus on anything else.  Low and high waves.  A buzz that rolled into a hum back into a buzz.  Warmth flipped into cold.  I suddenly felt a trigger appear within me.   Like when you finally allow yourself to sneeze.  Not knowing what would happen, but ferociously curious, I allowed myself to sneeze…so to speak.

She turned away from me and a balmy breeze seemed to hit my face and my brain felt like it had been submerged in cold water.  My fingertips tingled and my feet went numb.  She turned back to me and as quickly as those sensations hit, they were washed away in a wave, followed by new sensations.  Pain.  And sorrow.  I began to gasp and piercing tears raced down my cheek where a hot, pain of friction had erupted.  My forearm and wrist throbbed, my nose sent shocks of dull pain behind my eyes.  My lip felt taught and bulbous.  My face suddenly felt tenderized.  My heart—it ached.  My soul, it called out to a cold and empty cavern.  There was no way out of my life.  No way up.  Just here, or god forbid, down.

But when I saw her face, I had an epiphany.  A complete and total understanding.  I think she did to.  When she turned back to me, her face had turned calm.  Her eyes awash with peace and her lips parted into a shallow smile that twitched with euphoria.  Her injuries were still there, but they seemed pale to what they were mere seconds ago.  She stood herself up and looked down as I hit the floor, hand over my heart, silently sobbing.

“What’ve you done?  You healed me.  You’ve taken away what I can't bear.”

I looked up at her through tearful eyes.  I could do nothing but shrug as the enormity of her emotions ran through me.

“My faith could not endure this, so He brought you to me…”

I shrugged again.

“You suffer for me?”

“I don’t mean to.” I muttered.

She smiled widely, her face opened almost gleefully.

“...some sort of miracle.”

I stood myself up and she offered her arms to me for support.

“Do you still hurt?” I asked through a broken voice.

“No, I feel no pain.  No more sorrow.  I only feel...content.”

I grimaced as I put weight on my legs and my right thigh flexed and throbbed.  She reached out and grabbed my shoulders.

“Let me help you.”

That was a few months ago.  I had seen her only once after that and she had been healing remarkably well.  Since then, I had tested this newfound peculiarity only a handful of times.  
Once, while waiting for the light rail, a woman stood beside me, arguing with someone on her phone.  It was quite heated and quite annoying.  But I felt that familiar aura surround us both when she stepped next to me.  I stood up straight and waited for that impulse to hit me.  That trigger.  I could feel the energy roil between us.  And then I hit the sneeze button.  She stuttered midsentence.  Lost her train of thought.  Giggled and apologized to the person on the other end.  She hung up, breathed deep through her nose and let out a long, happy sigh.  I, on the other hand, felt deeply annoyed and hurt and betrayed and sad.  

It’s amazing what we are capable of feeling at any particular moment in time, towards one particular person, towards the world at large, even about ourselves. We’re infinitely complex, denying one another the forgiveness that we gladly give ourselves for our own suffering, our own ugliness, our own beauty.

I woke up in the middle of the night, checked my phone and saw a news alert about a shooting in France and in the article a man was interviewed and his name was given.  His son had been shot.  As I read the man’s name, I thought of him.  I tried to picture this man, what he looked like, what he spoke like.  What his son was like.  And when I thought of his name, that same field of energy surrounded me and that trigger appeared.  I had to know.

I felt a rush of fear, of hopelessness, of sciatica?  But also relief.  The following morning, I read that his son had survived the shooting.  I still felt that hopelessness.  I still felt that relief.  The relief lasted the longest.

This new ability showed me how much suffering we encounter in our lives.  Though it is not always us that suffers; the suffering seems to belong to all of us.  Is it what makes a life?  Is it what allows us to know pleasure?  Can one be held close without having cradled the other?  Will the sweet apple only sustain us after cutting our hands on the bark?  For all the suffering in the world, are we better?

Is our pain the primordial workings of the mortification of our flesh?  Darwinian flagellation?  What we wrought for ourselves once we stepped down from the trees and our brains grew?  Or perhaps some greater being requires our suffering.  To suffer as a god has suffered?  To endure for hope and faith?  To reach a greater meaning?  Does it exist solely for its cessation, to reach Nirvana?  Or is there no meaning behind it.  Is it simply the way things are?

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

Must the body suffer?  Must the mind break?  Must our hearts ache?

I can’t sit here and allow these questions to writhe within my gut knowing I can possibly find the answers.  That’s what’s brought me here, behind Minnehaha Falls.  A roaring waterfall in the middle of a city.  I’m going to shoulder the world’s despair.  Let the whole of us pass their suffering onto my back.  The entirety of what we endure on this pale blue dot, flowing through me and out into the ether.  Hopefully.  

What’s the worst that could happen?  That’s why I’m standing behind these raging waters, perched against the soft sandstone.  I’m about to suffer more than any one of us has ever before, it’s best not to make too big of a scene.  So let’s do this.

I think of the world.  I think of all of us in it.  Then I wonder if I bear the suffering of all of us, won’t I bear my own suffering too?  Like holding a mirror up to another mirror, will this suffering go on for infinity?  Fuck it, shut up.  We won’t know until I try it.

I think of the world.  I think of all of us in it.  The weak and the strong.  How all of us suffer.  How all of us suffer at all times, in some way.  And I can feel that cloud surround me.  It pushes the mist of the falls away from my face.  It smells like dust, but pricks at my skin like a freezing breeze.  Then I can feel the trigger.  Here we go.

Achoo.