They told me adversaries have as many valuable things to teach as masters.

 

The master teaches skills with kindness and patience - responsibility and wisdom. The master seeks to raise you up.

 

So, how could an adversary, in their rashness and brutality, their impulsive drive to put you below them at all expenses, teach you anything of value?

 

The answer is simple, yet hard to explain.

 

When we fight, we use what we have learned from our master.

 

(In some cases, we are our own masters.)

 

The heat of the battle, however, forces us to use it in our own style. For if we perform by rote, our motions will be rigid, laughably so, open to defeat.

 

Without an adversary, we can never feel that heat.

 

(And without a master, we will have no safe haven in which to cool our heads)

 

I found my adversary during a time of false masters.

 

I found her in the kitchen, in a cozy yet sterile house at the bottom of a hill called “Fallow.” I found her offering me tea and blintzes and toasted bagels with ikra.

 

She found me aberrant, she found me broken.

 

She found me with my young head adrift and afloat on a sea of unsafe ambitions.

 

She found me on her son’s arm, depositing my poisons of freedom and possibility into his blackened, twisted veins through my lavender claws.

 

She saw me throwing aspirin and warfarin into the harbor, grooming myself immaculately for the role of the primal homewrecker, cutting up the coils of time and the chains of blood and laying the pieces down in a straight line, extending toward the stars - extending towards the unknown.

 

And, in her efforts to mutilate me into something safe and worthy, she taught me how to turn worlds upside down without even trying.