the lid off and explain how to live without pain, and we’ll see whether it will work for you.”
“I think I’ll be able to live without pain,” Lika started warming up.
“Then stop antagonizing life. Take it as it is with all its perfection and malformation, sublimity and ignobility, genius and lack of talent, excessive loyalty and betrayal. Life… life is not what we think of it. It’s much bigger, wider, and deeper. You just need to overcome the borders that cut you off the life infinity.”
“What borders?”
“The borders that divide the world into black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, joy and pain…”
“Don’t we have to know what’s good and what’s bad?” Lika did not allow Coco to finish.
“You already know the difference, you can’t deny it, but you can learn how to perceive both of them just as an experience. Stop coloring your life in black and white. Let it be golden or violet, moreover, you’d better let it shine with all existing colors.”
“Is this the secret?”
“Yes. You just stop weighing everything and everyone on your scales.”
“It’s something abstract. I thought you’d give me some precise instructions…” Lika sighed.
“Want instructions? Then try to enjoy the pain that is inside you now.”
“What nonsense! How can you enjoy pain? Do you think I am completely mad?” Lika rebelled; she tried to see the cat’s eyes in the lighted square of the window.
“Right you are, it’s almost impossible to enjoy pain. Do you know why?”
“Pain is displeasing… unbearable… you want to get rid of it,” Lika bitterly pronounced the words, and chills covered her. “Pain kills… it penetrates inside and gets stuck… it… It bites your soul, gnaws it and overcasts it with rooting wounds that keep on nagging. And then the pain will always be a part of you. It’ll never leave you, and you’ll never get used to it. You may forget about it for a while, you may look aside, but it’ll summon you and then it’ll devour you turning you into a wreck and then you’ll die. The pain will kill you…” with her head and shoulders down, she seized talking and felt depressed because of all the words she had said.
“Great. Pathetic. And it’s somehow true within the limits of your own world. Nothing more than stereotypes.”
“And what is out there beyond the limits?” Lika asked automatically though she was not really interested. At the moment she was captured by her own pain. She was fighting it and pressing it out of her soul.
“What do you do when the traffic lights turn red?”
“Why?…” Lika asked but no answer made her give hers. “I stop, of course.”
“And you don’t want to kick the traffic lights off the road, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” she answered quietly having realized at once the point of the question. “Do you mean it’s the pain conception that makes it feel wrong?”
“Not conception, but non-perception,” Coco corrected Lika and fell silent as if giving the girl an opportunity to think over everything they had discussed. In a minute the cat went on. “Enjoy the pain… the same way you enjoy good feelings. Common, feel its depth… make it stronger… concentrate on it, but don’t try to fight it… try to hear its calls, accept it and enjoy it. Common! You can do it!”
Lika stood still gazing inside her heart. She followed the cat’s instructions just because she wanted to prove Coco that its advice was useless.
“I can’t!” she shouted out with astonishment.
“You can’t?”
“I can’t enjoy the pain,” Lika stated with embarrassment, “There’s no pain…. It’s gone…”
“No, it hasn’t. Traffic lights can’t move. You’ve accepted the pain and the red lights have turned green.”
“That’s incredible!” Lika was amazed, “Is it that easy?”
“Genius lies in simplicity as they say. Another thing is difficult, deary…”
“Which one?” the girl was eager to get the answer and to overcome any difficulty.
“To remember to use it in the moment of pain… you know, a habit is a second nature,” Coco concluded, and Lika understood at once that the conversation had come to an end.
The girl was walking around pondering over Coco’s words. The thing that amazed her most was that the pain had really gone. Previously, she would replay what had happened at Vlad’s a hundred times in her head recalling all the details of the conversation she had heard, assigning more and more tragical meaning to the words, and feeling pain mercilessly tearing her heart into pieces. But now she could not and did not want to remember certain words as if the whole situation had cringed and shrunk and had turned into a small glass ball, which you could hang on a Christmas tree.
“How funny… Pain isn’t that awful if you try and see another point of it,” Lika thought and looked up in the darkened sky performing its first stars. “Mom,” she called quietly. Somewhere deep inside her soul she believed that her mother’s heart could hear her calls coming from the far part of the world. “I love you, Mom,” she whispered fervently, and two teardrops slipped down her cheek. It had been ages since she said these four words last. Even thoughts about her mother had hurt her a lot because they had caused her inexpressible pain that could only be born in the heart of an abandoned child. As a child and later as a teenager, memories so often took her back to the moment when her mother was packing a suitcase picking her own and Katie’s clothes from the wardrobe while Lika was walking on air being sure they all were going on holidays. She was crooning the song that was coming on spot as she was thinking what clothes she wanted to take with her. Finally, she picked out a pink skirt with lace and put it into the suitcase commenting on where she would wear it. But mother was not happy about it at all. She knelt in front of the girl, and Lika could see tears in her eyes. Mom embraced her and began to tell her something about their family and their problems, but Lika could hardly understand anything except the thing that something bad had happened to their family. Even after Mom had told her that Lika would have to live with her father since then, the girl did not realize that Mom and Katie were leaving for ever. It took her several months of waiting in vain, bitter crying at nights and rare short chats on the phone during which Mom used to tell her one and the same thing – she loved her and missed her but could not tell when she would come back – to understand it. Little by little, those phone calls came to naught, tears of yearning raged themselves out, and only expectance of a meeting tightly rooted in her heart occasionally reaching her in her dreams at night. In those dreams she saw herself as a toddler sitting on her mother’s lap and feeling one mother’s hand brushing her hair while another one gripping her shoulder. There was some kind of special warmth coming from her hands, which filled her whole body and warmed her soul. It was that very warmth she felt now instead of the pain she had used to, and at that very moment the day that had tortured her for so many years turned into another “Christmas ball’.
“Thanks,” she whispered somewhere upwards, may be to the stars, and headed for the porch.
