Aviana Tovanche

Ten Tiny Essays on the Value of Suffering 

1. A tugging on my part and catching of roots living to hold on until there came a release. Sometimes difficult and ripping, other times swift, as if I was brandishing tiny daggers from their sheaths. A small wrong of clawing at grass. Disproportionate punishment, a permanent place in a pot of stew coming to a rolling boil. 

2. A dense mass I roll up the incline kissing the sky. This mass grows in size and the incline stretches up further. I wonder of the feasibility of infinite futility. 

3. Visit my mother and laugh, I squeeze her cold hand a little bit too hard. 

4. In January, there were negative numbers in Fahrenheit upholding quiet sheets of snow. I disrupted them with my boots until protest. Minutes or hours filled snow into my boots until I wasn’t sure I could take my feet with me. 

5. You and I live through this. No need to wear our hair-shirts. 

6.  Breathe it in, impose myself with it, I will send continuous invites until it becomes one of the most intimate parts of myself. I will weave it into my skin. I want to laugh about it in my sleep. 

7. Turn up the heat, take the elevator, pay for the closest parking, attempt to shirk this internal begging for necessary trial crying out of your pores. You will sweat yourself faint, this will crush your body into a red, sinewy mess, and you will not make it to your car. 

8. This is not simply a grimace of pain or the burial of a relative in the middle of February. It is the quelling of the sun making room for a night of too many hollow acts of penance and a blush of reformation. 

9. I do not ask much from suffering. I did, once, and quickly learned that to request anything would be missing the point. 

10. It is the seed swallowed that produces branches encircling your organs. A gift of a permanent, thick set of wooden coils. If you ever tried to reach down your throat and pull it up, much like I do to the weeds echoing of spring from the cracks in my driveway, you would die.