▸ Column · Azeroth — a Dalaran-style apprentice refectory recalled from youth, and a communal trestle alehouse in the present
JAINA PROUDMOORE replies.
Replied to by Jaina Proudmoore, with a rebuttal from Arthas Menethil.
The letter
I am four-and-thirty, and I still cannot cross the threshold of a crowded feast hall without sweeping the room for an empty bench in some far corner before I dare set down my plate. I traced the habit to my apprentice years: a clutch of older students who would wait until I had settled at the long table, then make a great performance of gathering their cups and decamping to the opposite end, laughing as they went. Last month my sweetheart proposed a popular alehouse with shared trestle benches, and I sat the whole evening rigid and mute while she decided I was cross with her — when in truth I was eleven again, certain every stranger crowded beside me was quietly relieved to have been seated next to someone else instead. I have never sought a healer of the mind for it, partly because I feel absurd: no one struck me, no one shamed me before a crowd in any way a chronicler would trouble to record. I know, in my head, that those students are forgettable grown men who lost my name decades ago. But the body keeps its own ledger, and crowded rooms with shared seating still take their toll. I am weary of paying it.
Jaina Proudmoore replies
Stop, first, at the word you used against yourself: absurd. You have decided your wound is too small to count because no chronicler would record it — and so you have buried it unexamined and called that good sense. It is not good sense. It is the oldest lie grief tells: that pain must reach some threshold of spectacle before it is permitted to be real. Your body's ledger is honest testimony. Believe it before you believe the ranking you have imposed on it.
I know the reflex you describe better than I would wish. I have walked into halls and measured every doorway for who would want me near and who would not — the exile learns that arithmetic young, and Kul Tiras taught me a colder version still. I built a whole city so that the unwanted would have one table where no one rose to leave.
So name it aloud — to her, plainly: "I am not angry; I am eleven and frightened." That is the cost, and it is real: you must hand someone the small shameful thing instead of a grand one. But understand me — those boys do not get to keep designing the rooms you live in. Take that authorship back. A healer of the mind is not a confession of weakness; it is a cartographer for a country you have been navigating blind.
— Jaina Proudmoore
Arthas Menethil weighs in
Jaina would have you cradle the wound. I will tell you what cradling does when it hardens.
You wrote a sentence and missed it: "certain every stranger was relieved." Certain. You reached a verdict at eleven and have applied it cleanly to every room since, never once testing it, because testing might cost you the comfort of knowing. I understand that comfort. I called it knowledge once, and it silenced every voice — including the one within — that might have spared me. Mine wore the robes of duty. Yours wears the robes of an old hurt.
So do not ask whether that table rejected you. Ask what being so sure of it, for twenty years, has made of every threshold you cross. The certainty is the prison, not the trestle bench.
— Arthas Menethil
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