Tower of Paradise

[Eyes of Balance (S)]

It was an eye that could distinguish the nature of good and evil of the target, the authenticity of their words, and the favorability that the target had.

His answer was sincere.

—I'm afraid. —I admitted quietly, dropping my defenses for a moment.

My honesty seemed to move Arceus. I could see in his eyes that he wanted to comfort me, tell me everything would be okay... but we both knew that would be a lie.

A long sigh escaped his lips. He adjusted his posture against the rock wall, without looking up.

—Fear is natural, KathyIn. We all feel it. But if you let fear limit you, you'll never know what you're capable of.

Although I was still a bit angry with him, after hearing these words, I felt he wasn't wrong at all.

Gradually, I became accustomed to conversing in the darkness. Without the burden of light, I felt freer to express those thoughts that I normally kept buried deep inside myself. I listened to his words in silence and, in the end, smiled sadly. How could I know what I was capable of when my entire life had been in the shadow of my perfect sister?

—You know... when I came here, I was ready to die —I confessed—. After all, in this world there isn't a single soul who cares whether I live or die. When I'm gone, no one will be sad. No one will even remember that I existed.

My voice sounded ethereal and strangely melancholic, creating a captivating atmosphere in the darkness as Arceus listened to me attentively.

On my face there was an expression of helplessness, but a moment later it disappeared and was replaced by a fierce determination.

—But then I changed my mind. At some point along the way, I decided to survive. I must survive, no matter what.

I spoke with a smile that hid all the bitterness accumulated over years.

Did living simply mean escaping death? As long as I wasn't technically dead, did that mean I was alive? I didn't know for sure, but something inside me refused to give up.

Arceus lowered his head. After a minute or so, wrapped in a heavy silence, he finally responded.

—To live a life worth remembering?

—I think living means treasuring what we have in life, whether it's a place, a person, or our relationships.

I was surprised by the sincerity of my words. A bright smile, perhaps the first genuine one in a long time, appeared on my face.

—You're terribly mature. —Arceus joked, not knowing how else to respond to such a statement.

I simply chuckled, a laugh that for the first time in a long time seemed genuine and spontaneous, free from the weight of expectations and failures.

After that, Arceus turned around and lowered his head, becoming like a statue again. It seemed our conversation had ended.

By the way... He must be doing it on purpose... He must think I'm too sensitive...

But thinking about this, I couldn't help but clench my teeth. I didn't know how many times I scolded him in my heart, but I didn't say it out loud.

Grumbling inside, I lay down and tried to keep watch. I really didn't have any feelings or anything, but I felt like I was being abandoned for no reason, so I was in a bad mood. There was no doubt that Arceus had somehow managed to please me. It had reached the point where he could influence my emotions to some extent.

Love and hate had something in common: interest. As if they were elements of the same coin, it was possible to exchange them.

For me, the natural state was to distance myself from others and treat them coldly. This was the result of the trauma I had suffered in my childhood, which had led me to not being able to trust another person. Unless one could enter my heart, any relationship one forged with me would only be superficial.

When we hear the word "trauma," we often associate it with extreme events: wars, natural disasters, inevitable tragedies. However, traumas in people don't always manifest so evidently. Sometimes they hide in small gestures of indifference, in the silence of those who should have protected us, or in words that sowed doubts about our own worth.

Traumas arose when an experience was too intense for a person's mind and heart to process. They could be caused by physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, neglect, abandonment, or even an unstable family environment. In those environments, parents, trapped in their own traumas, failed to provide emotional security. And therein lay the cruelest detail: what marked people, especially in childhood, wasn't just what happened to them, but also what should have happened and never did.

I had grown up in an environment where the little love I knew was conditional, where "affection" was always accompanied by criticism, and where silence prevailed over words of affection. I not only carried visible scars; the wounds in my heart were as deep as a sunken ship in the middle of the ocean.

I had learned the hard way that repressed emotions never died; they were buried alive and returned later in even more devastating forms. Traumas didn't disappear, they hid and transformed, finding new ways to manifest.

I met some children who became extremely anxious, always expected the worst, and lived in a constant state of alert, as if danger was lurking at any moment. On the other hand, I met others who had learned to disconnect completely from their emotions, becoming people who didn't know how to name what they felt, because in the environments in which we grew up it was never safe to feel.

Some sought obsessive control over their lives, trying to ensure they would never again feel the powerlessness they once experienced. Others, like me, repeated the same patterns, unconsciously seeking to recreate the environment of our childhood. As painful as it had been, it was the only kind of love I knew.

Those of us who grew up in unstable or threatening environments always remained on alert. Our nervous system adapted to survive, constantly entering a state of fight or flight. This meant that, even when there was no real danger, our bodies reacted as if there were. The heart raced, muscles tensed, breathing became short and shallow. And the worst: this biological programming didn't disappear with time.

It remained active for decades, transforming into chronic anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, and even autoimmune diseases. Not only did the mind suffer, the body also kept records of what happened. Traumas weren't simply a story about the past; they lived in the present, in the body, in the breath, and in the way those of us who experienced them reacted to the world. That was the great tragedy of traumas: they not only marked the past, but also hijacked the future.

Without realizing it, we carried the fears of childhood in our personal relationships. We could become adults who never felt good enough, who feared emotional intimacy, who sabotaged themselves without understanding why. We could spend a lifetime running from something we couldn't even name.

But there was something we needed to remember: traumas were not a destiny. What happened to us might have shaped who we were, but it didn't have to define who we would be. The first step was to see it, the second to understand it, and the third, the most challenging of all, was to grow and accept that healing was possible. Because it was, or at least that's what I liked to believe.

That's why, telling someone to simply get over a trauma was not understanding the depth of its roots. This type of pain didn't dissolve with time nor disappear with willpower. It needed to be processed, understood, and released.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it... destiny.