Will-o'-the-wisp

"I'm going to work," he said as he walked out the door, his wife hugged him good-bye as he left. He only worked a couple blocks away at the old factory downtown in the city where he was born. He had a hard life, his mother died when he was still a baby, and his father abandoned him to an orphanage when he was still young. He had been too much for his father to handle, and this might well have been the truth, but the truth is often painful, as it was this time. He lived with the pain of being separated, even now that he was an adult and married; he couldn't forget it or forgive it. Always he lived with the pain of rejection, and bristled at any notion that someone was rejecting him in any way.

At the factory, his job was a simple one, he ran the elevator up and down between the floors. He arrived at the factory while it was still dark, punched in 5 minutes before his shift was going to start. For most, bringing the elevator up and down would seem a pointless and meaningless job, but for him, it seemed like one of the most important jobs in the place. He kept the goods moving between floors. Without him, everything would come to a stop. Didn't matter which floor he stopped at, people would tease him or poke fun of him. He thought of it as torment. "Quit tormenting me!", he would say to them, but this only seemed to make them all the more eager. Whether they were poking fun of his clothes, how he cut himself when he shaved, or making lewd remarks about his wife; it didn't matter, it was always something. He never grew used to it, and it always upset him. Which is what they wanted, and he always ended up giving them what they wanted, and they always came back for more.

A few weeks ago they had sent him up and down on the elevator around 10 times, bringing buckets of steam up from the boiler room to the 4th floor. They kept getting mad at him, because it was all gone by the time he got upstairs. Of course, he never realized that it was just more tormenting, until they all started laughing about it. He took his job seriously, and every task seemed like an important task, if it had to do with his work. Which made the laughter all the more painful, and hard to understand.

The orphanage where his father had left him was a bad place. Filled with pain, and filled with other children who were unwanted by the world. The one guy who came to clean the rooms, would often lock the door behind him when he came to clean. Sometimes the man's fist fell on him, sometimes he humiliated him in other ways. Either way, it was always painful and humiliating. The only comfort was that he was not alone. He was surrounded by the unloved and the unwanted. It was worse once he became an adult and had to fend for himself. Lucky, or sort of, he was to have landed a decent paying job at the factory. Good work was hard to come by, especially for a fellow like him.

The greatest luck in his life was to find a wife who loved him. Someone who listened to him, and never tormented him. Of course, he didn't see it as luck. He was fervently religious and believed that God had provided this woman for him, someone to be his balm of Gilead. Someone to help him bear the torment that he endured. Someone who understood, as she lived a life of torment much like his, and yet very different. Although, they never talked much about what happened to them during their days, both of them understood the pain of the other. In the dark they held each other close and gave the other one the love that no one else in the world would share with them.