[Nullia]

I find that the human heart is the strangest thing in this world.

I have no illusions of grandeur—I am an extremely sheltered girl.
I know what I am. Likewise, I know what I am not.
Though I am smart, I am pretty, I have a wide spread of talents;
Though I am able to cook, enjoy cleaning, though I am well-versed in history,
Though I like intellectual debates, though I am of the cloth, though I know my way around the mind of another,
I am not well-versed in love.

I often hear this idea that the heart and mind are separate emotional concepts.
I figured it foolish.
The mind is, naturally, in complete emotional control of the body. That is how it works. That is the driving concept of feeling.
Things fire off in your brain, and you feel something. Chemicals go up there, and you feel something.
And yet in a solitary room with exactly one other, I found myself terrified.
She touched my hand, and it froze. I tried to move it, but could not.
There was no magic. There was no trick. I felt the texture of someone's fingertip, and my arm stopped working.

I felt vulnerable.

And it terrified me.


I wouldn't say that I'm a guarded person. I wouldn't say I build walls around myself.
But I don't like things that I don't understand.
Usually, that is a faint annoyance. That I don't properly comprehend something.
That there's something I missed.

Usually I feel a drive to know it, be it of interest or spite.
But in that immediate moment, it's not that I didn't understand what was happening,
It's that I didn't understand myself,
And that I was terrified to find out.
Not that there is some part of me yet to be explored,
That there's some part of me that I don't understand,
But rather that that feeling of not understanding could be so...
Visceral.
A rush of realization that, all at once, I'd become completely powerless.


A while ago,
I fought a Nethadrin.
It pinned me to the grass, and brought cutting gales to my throat.
I find it disturbing how quickly I processed and prepared for my life to end.
For myself to die.
I couldn't breathe. I couldn't speak. Like some kind of beast I sat in rabid, feral shock,
Clawing at the dirt, kicking my feet, trying and failing to scream.

But this is where I realized it. What truly made me understand the depth of non-understanding I have for the so-called "human heart".

I recovered from that experience. I moved on. Covered myself in the blood of another Demon for the sake of others. I did not stumble again.

But when I saw her cry that day, I had never known in my life a more shallow, underwhelming fear—
—that hurt me so badly as this.


I can only explain it, then, by submitting to that foolish idea. By admitting to my own ignorance.
I freeze up when she touches my fingers.
I stop thinking when she stares at me for too long.
I find myself staring at her in turn.
I want her praise.
I want her recognition.
I want to figure out this vile torrent of things that I don't recognize not because of my adherence to the Ordinance and it's teachings but because there is some part of myself I simply do not understand,

And it terrifies me.


So it is that I come to understand a lack of understanding. So it is that I find the shallowest fear the most terrifying. So it is that I recognize the division between "mind" and "heart".
So it is I find that, perhaps, I do not lack one after all.

And I think that is the strangest thing.