The Hand That Rubs the Sore Foot, and the Times I Nearly Told the Table Off

Nine seventeen at night, the glass of water on the desk long gone cold. The screen still on. I was listening to a talk about patience, mostly to have a human voice in the room, and I did not expect to remember any of it for long.

Then came the part about walking into a table by accident and the sudden pain in your foot. The hand immediately reaches down to rub it. I laughed out loud on my own.

Laughed because the example was so plain. A table, a foot, a hand. It sounded like a moral lesson from primary school, simple to the point of being funny. And once I had laughed I stopped. If it were an older version of me, the table would have been told off before anyone asked how the foot was doing.

I know that scene well. Often it is not an actual table, it is a sentence, a curt message, a voice pitched slightly higher than usual. It knocks against me and the pain is immediate. And instead of checking where it hurts, I turn around looking for the table to deal with.

The table is usually innocent. It has been standing there for a long time. It was my foot in a hurry, my eyes elsewhere, my head busy with something else. But nobody is calm in the first second of pain. Pain is a persuasive speaker. It talks fast, talks loudly, talks as if the whole world had just deliberately picked a fight with you.

What I liked about that story is that it does not ask me to pretend I am not hurt. A sore foot is sore. An aching tooth aches. Somebody says something unpleasant and it stings, because I am not made of wood, standing there being knocked around and smiling like a statue in a park.

I am a little allergic to the version of patience that means keeping quiet. Keeping quiet is often just anger in a gentle coat. Silent on the outside, muttering everything on the inside. A calm face as if nothing had happened, while three episodes of revenge have already been produced in my head, with a soundtrack, slow motion, and a deeply wronged protagonist played by me.

I used to mistake that silence for maturity. Not saying anything, and thinking I was good at this. Not reacting, and thinking I was deep. But there were times when, after the silence, nothing inside me was any wider. It had only got tighter. A very sealed kind of tight, which after a while develops a smell.

Patience, the way I heard it that evening, is not swallowing the anger and then awarding yourself the title of a noble man. It is knowing there is a fire going inside you and still managing to throw one small scoop of water on it before it takes the stove, the house, and conveniently the relationship as well.