TRIGGER WARNING

Brief mention of suicidal ideation

The snow started falling sometime shortly after Thanksgiving. Winter break would come after finals; I would need to make arrangements to board over the holidays. I knew some dorms would remain open, for the sake of the large number of international students who attended the university, and other students who, like me, either could not travel home during the winter break or had nowhere to go, but I didn't know if my dorm was one of the ones that would stay open, or if I would need to move temporarily into another room. If I did need to relocate, I hoped I would not need to share a double with another student.

It wouldn't be fair to the other student to have to put up with my company.

I paused by the concert hall on my way back from classes (all of which were on the north side of campus; the south side was mostly for practical subjects in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering, subjects that I had little interest in studying). I did this often. Every time I passed it, I felt stabbed by memories, but I could never help myself - I had to go there. It was one of the few solid pieces of my past that I could still access. I don't know if I can fully convey how disorienting it is to be cut off from everything that was once your everyday existence, let alone to go through it once in your late teens, then to have to undergo the process again a few years later. It makes memory itself seem unreal. Having a piece of my past that I could see and touch kept me from disintegrating.

And so, I tried to go to the concert hall every day; once there, I would sit on the steps, and hug my arms, and if what I was wearing allowed it, run my hands over the lumps of scar tissue on my upper back, wishing it was not my own skin that I was caressing.

Today was not a day that I could stuff my hands under my shirt and run my fingers across the skin of my back, bundled as I was against the cold, so I settled for holding myself by the arms.

A faint leitmotif of memory in my ears sang to me of love, death, and transcendence.

My head was pounding again. Nearly three months of excruciating headaches, now. My joints were hurting, as well. My chest was in pain. Everything hurt. I was so tired that the mere thought of walking the rest of the way to my dorm room made me tremble. I wondered if that would be my lot for the rest of my life.

I wondered what it would be like to fall asleep on the steps, and never wake up. Dying of cold exposure was supposed to be one of the more peaceful ways to die, or so I'd read at some point.

The wind came gusting out of nowhere, landing on my face full on and drawing tears from my eyes.

"Damn you," I muttered. "I can't do it, but I can at least think about it, can't I?"

And then I wept. Again.

The counselor's office was decorated in Contemporary Inoffensive Ugh. Or something like that. I doubt that there ever was such a style, officially, but I can't think of a better description for cheap pastel office furniture, framed posters with "inspirational" messages and faded, bland reproductions of Impressionistic art, fake flowers and ferns made from silk and wire, and institutional wall-to-wall carpeting. In all fairness, the counselor probably found the university-provided décor as uninspiring as I did.

There was also a teddy bear in the corner, holding a Valentine's heart.

I hated Valentine's Day that year.

"So. You're experiencing chronic pain, and you recently had a breakup with your romantic partner?" the counselor asked.

"The doctor at the campus health center thought I ought to try talking to you," I replied. My reply was probably not a very nice one, I am sorry to say; I have never liked going to counselors for "talk therapy." The thought of swallowing a live frog is more appealing to me than the prospect of spilling out my guts to a total stranger. It's a form of therapy that often seems to do wonders for other people, and I have nothing against it in the abstract, but personally, I'd just as soon avoid it. Why should the intimate details of my life be anybody's business but my own? "Erastes - my former Magister - and I separated when I started college this fall. The migraines and soreness and exhaustion started shortly after that. I've been on antidepressants for the past few months, and they haven't really been doing much good. My head nearly always hurts. It's not a matter of how many times a week I get headaches, or even how many times a day; it's a matter of how much my head hurts at any given time. I've also stopped having periods. I think I've had maybe one period since September. No, I'm not pregnant."

"Erastes, that's an unusual name. How pretty. Your... what?"

Here it comes, I thought to myself; well, either the counselor's head will explode, or it won't. I began to understand the reason why the duties of a student of magick are to know, to dare, to will, and, especially around the uninitiated, to be silent.

"My Magister. It might be easier to call him my former Master, but it wouldn't be strictly accurate, because it was a little more complicated than that. We had a temporary arrangement, or what was initially supposed to be temporary, anyway, meant for instructional purposes. I wasn't bound to him, at least not in any deeply subservient way; I was magically and sexually apprenticed to him for four and a half years, and yes, I submitted to him and followed his instructions when he gave them, but it was for the sake of learning, not for a full enslavement, and even that apprenticeship was something separate from the way our souls eventually bound themselves together. Wed themselves. This is so hard to describe to someone who's never been in that kind of situation. It wasn't originally going to be a romantic relationship - sexual, yes, of course, I thought it would be easier to learn how to do certain things, such as how to use riding crops, if I had those things done to me first; also, I wanted him - God, I wanted him - but falling in love? We never meant to fall in love, because we didn't originally think we were meant to last together, and maybe we were right about that. Teachers and students aren't supposed to fall in love, anyway. It can make the dynamics of the relationship awkward. But we did. We fell in love."

"Wait, he was your high school teacher?"

"No, no, I was twenty when I first met him. I went to a Catholic high school, anyway. The classes there were mostly taught by nuns and priests. They aren't allowed to date anybody."

"So, is he a professor here? Were you in one of his classes? Was that how you met?"

"No. He's not that kind of teacher. He doesn't live in this city, by the way. He's not connected to the university. He works for a public library. Somewhere else."

It had been long enough, at least, that simply saying the words aloud did not trigger another attack of tears. I had finally reverted to my old habit of never crying. It was just as well; crying seemed to make my head hurt more.

"And I'm always in pain, now. Headaches. I get these terrible migraines. Chest pains. My bones are so cold that they hurt. My muscles ache. My shoulders always hurt, no matter what I do to stretch them - of course, that might be due to scar tissue from where the whip landed, we got a little overzealous the last time we used it, although it was nothing that put me in the emergency room, thank heavens, that would have been awkward. He was very careful. He left nothing that would require skin grafts."

He could have sutured the wounds he'd made, and removed them just before driving me to college, but that would have involved needles, and of course, I'd wanted to avoid needles, even if they were being used in a place where I could not see how they were being used. I probably should have allowed him to stitch me. In the end, though, the bleeding stopped before I lost a dangerous amount of blood, and my flesh managed to heal on its own.

The counselor's face had, if I recall correctly, turned an interesting shade of white. Perhaps I am misremembering; I am trying to recollect a minor incident that occurred a long time ago, and the mind can play tricks with memory. Still, I remember milk-white skin, and a hint of sweat, which would be odd, because the room was not hot.

After a long pause, the counselor finally asked, her voice shaking, "You say he was your teacher. Was there a significant age difference between the two of you?"

"Oh. Yes. Yes, there was. He was about twenty years my elder. I don't see why that would be important, though."

"He sounds a bit predatory."

"Actually, I made the first move." And the second, and the third.

Ice was beginning to settle into my voice. I should have known where this conversation would go.

"I see." Another long pause. "How is your relationship with your father?"

"Nonexistent, like my relationship with my mother. And no, my father and my ex have nothing in common, except for both being older than I am, and both being good teachers. This is not about my father. This was never about my father. If it was my father I wanted, I would have chased after my father the way Anais Nin did - and that is a really disgusting image, so I would prefer not to dwell on it. Ew. Yuck."

What on earth did this counselor learn in college, anyway? Was she fed on a steady diet of Freud or something? Freud's theories of the Oedipus complex and the Elektra complex were debunked ages ago.

Eventually, the school counselor sent me out of the office with an assignment to write down some affirmations, and list qualities that I found good about myself, to "boost my self-esteem."

Apparently, I was suffering from "low self-esteem."

Well, I had nothing better to do.

I sat on my bed with a pen and a sheet of notebook paper and started to write down personal qualities I considered to be mine, that I liked enough about myself to list them as positive attributes: Intelligence. Courage. Grit. Devotion. Curiosity. Insight. Conviction. Resilience. Imagination. Taste. Independence. Self-discipline. Focus. Drive. Strength of will.

All these things, I realized as I wrote them down, came with memories; all of them had been qualities Erastes had praised and cultivated. I remembered studying in libraries, or at home, writing essays, and proving points no matter how hard I was pressed to defend them. I remembered holding myself silent and still through bloody canings that would make most people scream, and even harsher things that almost nobody could bear without first being restrained, things that probably stretched the limit of human possibility. I remembered snow evaporating into fog around my naked body. I remembered my first awful cooking experiments; I remembered doing tai ch'i in the living room, side by side with Erastes, and thought to myself that I ought to take it up again because I was rusty and would need a good deal of practice to get the forms back into my muscle memory.

I remembered lying against him in bed, sated and sleepy, wrist tethered to his, as we whispered to each other how much we loved each other; me whispering in English, he usually whispering in Homeric Greek. It took so much to get him to talk in English when he had something emotional to say, but what he said was usually clear no matter how he said it, or in what language.

Remembering hurt me, of course. It did not, however, make me cry.

I could handle this. I was used to pain.

I decided I had no self-esteem problems; also no need for counseling. Such a hard decision to make, almost as difficult as a decision to wear boots when walking in snow.