We Carry the Pain with Us [Ehecatl, Idonea, Fen]
From the inn's window, its open curtains as red as the roofs of Beruna, there was Fen clothed in a simple tunic and trousers, a courtesy gift given to him by the innkeeper. The young man stood in the middle of the room, sleep still dashed across his half-closed eyes, as the sun woke, its light stretching across the town. It came upon the inn, cloaking Fen and the bed and the stool and the door. Nothing the sun hit belonged to Fen.
Fen just wanted to pee. That was how it all started. The urge to relieve oneself. How it ended was the young man straddling between woods and town, no longer in his cramped one-bedroom apartment holding two, usually ten, people, but instead he was in a land called Narnia. Where exactly Narnia was on the map, Fen didn't know. Leaving the inn, scratching the back of one ear, under his breath he cursed in three languages, a reprimand towards his high-school self for not focusing in geography class.
It didn't matter either way. No longer was his lungs constricted by the city air that, when wrung and aired, held so much pain. Inhaling, sunlight filling him, the young man was convinced again, much like for the past two weeks, of Narnia's tranquility. Narnia was no part of that horrid world he came from. It was much too perfect.
The man shook his head. No, it wasn't perfect at all. Fen looked up at the sky, and deciding it was still too early for his shift in the inn, succumbed to the urge of walking into the Great Woods, of clearing his mind. Anxiety gnawed at his chest till one question bled through his tunic: when can he return to his family?
He was wrong. There was still pain, and its stench clung onto him, always.