The Better Part of Valor

A personal essay by Washington C Pearce

That's me, on the left. The calm before the fight really starts

Injury is an inherent risk of life, but some wounds are deeper than skin, and change our lives forever.

Simon Garfunkel’s “The Boxer’ plays on the speakers behind me. I’m trying to exercise again, but the pain in my arm prevents me from moving how I’d like. Every pushup sends bolts of lighting through the nerves, from my elbow to my head, reminding me I’m an idiot. 

Weak. 

I’d failed, justly, and now I’m paying the price in pain. Grunting, I refuse to listen to my arm and push up off the ground another two, three times, before the pain is too great and I roll over, panting. I have to get better, get stronger, or else I will never win again.

It’s only been a few weeks. Finals are halfway done: I’ve mostly finished, only a small religion test stands between me and freedom. But I can’t escape that fight that left its marks on my body and mind, bruised my flesh and wounded my attitude. Whenever I close my eyes, and push past the frequent headaches, I go back to the fight.

In the clearing stands a boxer, and a fighter by his name 

Now it’s past 5 on a Saturday afternoon. It’s still light outside: the evening April sun still stands above the horizon, dutifully sending out rays that glance off the metal chairs, sweaty kids, discarded jackets or sweaters, and people gathered to watch. I’ve been here a few hours now, watching from the outside but not participating yet. It’s my turn. I look to my right and my left, as I enter the mat. On my right, my girlfriend and teammates offer encouragement and wish me luck. On my left, my opponent’s family does the same. His sister hugs him around the waist: she’s not very tall yet, probably eight or nine. His father claps him on his shoulders, “go get him.” Go get me, he means. I’m ready.

My parents aren’t here to watch me fight, but I know what they’d do if they were. My mother would beam, then hide her face in my father’s arm and wince at what details she could see. My father would be stoic, and ask questions afterwards like he was trying to understand my efforts, but he’d do it as an outsider, never betraying the worry he’d feel in anything but words of simple concern and inquiry.

We exchange handshakes, bow. We chat, a little, as we circle. He’s a freshman, I’m a sophomore. He’s a mechanical engineering student, I’m an English major. He put in his mission papers last week, I’ve been home for a year. Very different people, yet together in the circle we’re the same. Two sides of an orb that slowly rotates around a single point.

Then the clash. I go down, pulling him with me. He falls, forward instead of backwards. I don’t remember him hitting me, his knee connecting with the bone just over my right eye. I think I might have even blacked out for a moment. The next thing I remember, I’m beneath him, fighting to keep his hands from my neck. It’s a struggle, but after tens of minutes of exertion I roll him over completely, take his smooth neck between my arms, and crank to one side, squeezing my forearms against his veins as I do so. I hear his mother gasp, but I press on, and then the referee is separating us, pulling us away and to our feet. He hands me my belt, I help him up, I shake his trembling hand and we go away from the place of our confrontation.

I change. 

The pounding in my head subsides, but the dizziness doesn’t fade away. I lose my next two fights because of it, spraining my elbow in the process. The EMT checks my eyes, and says they’re normal, the pupils dilate and respond to the presence and absence of light. Seventy-two hours later I’m at the doctor’s and he’s telling me I’m lucky I didn’t die in my sleep. I call professors, I get extensions on papers and projects. I sleep a lot. I try to heal, but while the pains in my arm and head slowly subside, the weakness in my soul doesn’t. The nagging voices, “You should have won,” “You’re not strong enough to win,” “You get hurt because you’re weak;” those nagging voices never stop.

He carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down or cut him 'til he cried out

I sleep, fitfully. 

My head won’t stop churning and rushing around, exploring new paths and trying to connect neurons. Is this a side-effect of the healing process? During the day my brain seems to hardly want to work at all. It doesn’t remind me to eat, and it doesn’t help regulate my emotions when something surprises or disturbs me. There are gaps now, where dates and homework assignments used to live. 

In my apartment, about 2 weeks after the injury.
Like most of the photos from then, I have no memory of taking it

 

Apparently I watched Get Smart with my girlfriend. She assures me I loved it, but the memory was lost from the table of my brain. It simply naps through the day, only catching up that it should be awake when I’m trying to sleep. I lie in bed, my brain scratching at the walls of my skull and mewling for attention. Yes, I think my brain is a cat. 

I get up for a drink of water. On the way, I grab three ibuprofen — more than I should take, probably, but the pounding in my head is exacerbated by the light I turn on in the hallway. In the kitchen, I gulp down the pills and chase them with water. No effect, though I know it’ll take time. I go to the broad window overlooking the quiet road, and I stare back from my reflection in the dark glass. I’ve lost weight, muscles and fat from lack of exertion and appetite. The t-shirt and shorts I’m wearing betray my thinner, frailer arms and legs to the empty world of my living room. I peer into my own eyes, searching for the wound that haunts me, the bruise on my brain that’s crippled me. But from the outside, my head is unmarred. 

That day at the tournament, I received all sorts of physical punishment, rugburns across my face and chest, a sprained elbow, a hyperextended knee, and smaller bruises on my arms, back, head, and neck. But the wound I’ll remember is the one inside, the one nobody else can see. Sometimes, I think I’m crazy. I think that the hurt must be something I’ve made up, some sort of mental block that I could get over if I just try harder. 

The ironic thing is, the concussion is all in my head. That’s the problem. If it were more visible, people would understand when I don’t want to eat or sleep, or can’t concentrate on a task for more than a few minutes. I tear myself away from my silent doppelganger, and return to bed, not to sleep for hours yet as my brain ricochets endlessly down hypothetical paths.

 

---

 

Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest

Dinner at my aunt’s house. My parents are in town, here to drop off my little brother at college after a summer working back east. Conversation turns to current events, to presidents and pandemics and partisan information. A debate sprouts, disagreement flourishes and buds, then contention blooms as the argument becomes heated. 

 I don’t remember the specifics of the topic, just the anger in me, the harsh words from my brothers, the casual dismissal from my father, the protests from my wife. Eventually, we come to our senses— we’re rational adults, or at least we claim to be, and we shouldn’t be fighting like alley cats over events likely outside our grasp. 

When we leave, hours later, my wife cries in the car while I hold her close. “Do they really think so little of me?” I can’t answer her. I can’t answer because I’m struggling with the same. The jeering, the disdain, the anger that all parties brought to the table has soured my spirit. Wounded me. The pounding in my head returns, a rhythm like I hadn’t felt the whole summer. I don’t know it right that minute, but this is the last time I feel safe getting into sensitive subject matter with that part of my family.

I am leaving, I am leaving—
The urge to lie, to hide the wound deepens. 

When my mother sends homeopathic pills, we accept, and the bottles grow dusty above the fridge. When my father talks about masks and measures his school has taken, I stay silent, because I know I can’t say anything without another fight. I take excuses to avoid topics that I know will bring conflict. Like an animal testing for injury, I gingerly put a foot in exercise, in video games. But not politics, not current events, not Honor Codes or gay rights. Those things bring conflict, argument, hurt. 

I hope it’s not cowardice: I tell myself it’s smarter to live like this, picking and choosing my fights. What battles are worth pain? Deciding where and when and if I can get hurt. I learn where there’s thin ice, so I get better at avoiding it, looking to all the world like I’ve healed from this wound too. But the words we spit back and forth over french toast are still embedded in my chest, and they look like they’re there to stay.

Works Cited

Simon, Paul. Lyrics to “The Boxer.” Paul Simon, 2020, Accessed 9 November 2020,
https://www.paulsimon.com/track/the-boxer-4/

Image Credits

"Circling" by Marlo Fowler Pearce; personal photo 

"Together" by Washington C Pearce; personal photo