tatami mha

Once she’d finally found a good spot, she remembered what she was trying to do. Slowly and steadily, she brought her hand up and over his chest, the light sheet rippling above her the only thing keeping them from the warm autumn night. Again, she brought it down past the end of the hair on his belly and only stopped once she felt that rough patch of hair just above his groin. With only the moon filtering through the sheet above she could barely make it out as she peered over her dad’s waist. Short and curly, much curlier than his armpit hair, pitch-black, though most of his hair was with only a bit of grey poking through.

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.

As she expected the next day, her father was in his chipper mood, catching him only as he left the house given it was the start of a new week.