I'm an Engineer

Translated from the Persian original.

I live in my paternal body, a body I inherited from my family and grew up in. I'm not from anywhere else; my body is the only place I'm allowed to live. Sometimes I look at other bodies and want to settle in them. They say it can't be done, but I never understood why. Besides me, other things live in my body too, creatures called pain. They live in different places in me: some in the chest, some around the throat and the esophagus, some in the center of the head, beneath and at the core of the heart, and some in the stomach and thereabouts. I'm not a social person, but I keep company with my pains. Since childhood I've amused myself with them. Some of them are pains of old, noble stock, and you can read about them everywhere; everyone has them, and no one hides them either. Then there's another group, and it isn't clear who really has them and who doesn't, because no one tells the truth about them. Most people think pains are the empty places left by pleasures, but I, being close to them, know well that it's otherwise.

At first I didn't know them well, I didn't bother with them at all, but little by little they came to me on their own. They didn't introduce themselves; they seemed to have come to play, but they messed with me. Sometimes when they tormented me too much, my father would give me things; I'd swallow them and the pains would leave for a while. Later I found out this was their food. Pains behave strangely, especially the ones that live in my head; they're actually more civilized than the rest. They can talk, and every day there are more of them. Sometimes they all talk at once, so that you can hardly make anything out. I've wrestled with them a lot, I've researched them a lot, I know a great deal about them. They're dictatorial, selfish creatures; for instance, at night you have no right to sleep until they've gone to sleep, and in the morning they wake you whenever they feel like it. I've protested to them about this many times, but even when you feed them they don't let up, and every day their food grows. Each of them resembles one of the people I know, as if they copy themselves from those people. They think very highly of themselves. Once I heard one of them say that pains help you grow, like literacy; they even have a university.

My father always wanted me to become an engineer. And I saw that I'd lived with pains for a long time; they love me, they need me to live and to feed. I saw that I was good at fixing them, at calming them down, good at handling them and laughing along with them, at tending to them and sending them off to get on with their own lives.

Now I'm a pain engineer.

Still, my father isn't proud of me.

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