Member-only story
The Authentic Eclectic
The Comfort Creature
She was visited by a rare maternal state as he cried, pink as the sun. She rolled over in bed and wrapped her arms around his quaking back.
“It’s all so insanely hard, and it shouldn’t be. Everything seems pointless,” he sobbed. “Why do this? Why continue to try, when everything’s so fucked?”
“Yeah,” she said gently, squeezing him.
He began with his problems as a schoolchild and spoke his way through his life into societal problems, global politics, and, at last, the universal sourness of existence. To think that childhood problems could lead a person to reject billions of galaxies! She stroked his head.
He stopped speaking, but clutched her arm and cried for several minutes. She continued to nuzzle and caress him. She did not feel sad, nor so-called “compassion fatigue,” nor numb. She felt a deep empathy that was joyously spiced with the knowledge that he, poor thing, was fine, and only seeing everything sideways, like a toddler sincerely devastated by a dropped ice cream cone.
When the sobs subsided, she asked, “Do you want to know what comforts me?”
“What’s that?” he asked in a voice tinged with the cynical certainty of despair.
