Pain by Pane - Chapter 9 Asha's Beginnings
Pain by Pane
Chapter 9 - Asha's Beginnings
Continued from Chapter 8
Five minutes here, ten minutes there — Asha learned to manage the intrusions as well as anyone could. Life’s old commercials of regret, piercing reality. She’d let the memories run their script while the walls around the hollow in her slowly eroded.
When she was younger, those were the days she’d walk that block up Washington Street, wearing her Sunday best, praying the doors would still be open. Usually, they were. The steeple always called.
Inside, she’d find the most hidden spot she could — just to sit. Asha loved the stained-glass windows; they looked like pages torn from her coloring books and set on fire with light. The silence. Mary beside the altar, her pierced heart blazing red and gold through dust-moted air, beaming for all to see — even for a child who felt too broken to be seen. It gave Asha a comfort she couldn’t name yet somehow remembered, the way a soul remembers the womb that once held it.
Sometimes she wondered if anyone ever noticed her there: the small girl folded into the shadows, legs tucked beneath her, eyes not on the priest or the pews but on the colors crawling across the floor. Blues and golds and deep, bleeding reds washed over her skin like borrowed holiness. She liked when the light touched her. It made her feel less invisible — as if, just for a moment, the world paused to see her without asking anything in return.
In those quiet corners, her mind would settle just enough for the flashes to fade. They never vanished, but they softened — like someone turning down the volume on a television left playing in an empty room. The ache in her chest loosened. Her breath stopped shaking. She sat very still and let the warmth from the windows seep into her bones.
And in that warmth, something inside her whispered that she belonged to more than pain. That maybe, just maybe, there was a place where a child didn’t have to be a shield, or a secret, or a warning. A place where her heartbeat wasn’t something to hide.
She didn’t have the words for it then. She only knew that when she left the church and walked back down Washington Street, the world felt a little less sharp. The air didn’t sting the same way. Her footsteps sounded like her own again.
It never lasted long — the flashes always found her — but those moments in the colored light stitched her together just enough to keep going.
As she grew older, Asha learned to recognize the exact second the world shifted: the breath before a memory struck, the tightening behind her ribs, the spark crawling up her spine like static before a storm. She carried that awareness the way some children carried house keys — always in her pocket, always ready, always knowing the weight of it.
But she also carried the church-the warmth of those windows and the open door leading to them.
Not the sermons or the hymns — those faded quickly — but the stillness. The colored light. The feeling of being held by something that asked nothing of her. Even when the years passed and she no longer walked Washington Street, that sanctuary lived in her — a soft hand between her shoulder blades, steadying her steps.
Sometimes, late at night, when the flashes flared brightest and sleep felt like another place she wasn’t welcome, she would close her eyes and rebuild the stained glass in her mind. Pane by pane. Color by color. She’d imagine the light spilling through it, washing her in hues she never found anywhere else, with Mary’s wounded, burning heart at the center. And slowly, her breath would deepen.
It wasn’t peace; she didn’t know that word in her body yet. But it was something close — a fragile echo of it. A reminder. A thread connecting her to a world where tenderness had once touched her, however briefly.
Asha held onto that thread with the quiet determination of someone who knew, even without language, that survival required more than escaping harm. It required a place — real or imagined — where she could set her story down for a moment.
And for her, that place had always been the sunlight through glass, carrying Mary’s pierced and blazing heart straight into her own.
Author's/Artist's Note: I am disabled survivor using assistive technology, which changes day by day pending health - (#zebralife). -to allow me to create, based on my needs on any given day - Art Therapy. We all can find ways.
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