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Pain -- has an Element of Blank --
It cannot recollect
When it begun -- of if there wer e
A time when it was not-- Emily Dickinson
This pain is overwhelming. Neverending. Intolerable. The more I try to resist it, the tighter it holds me in its clutches, until it squeezes the air out of me, the hope. It is trying to squeeze the very life out of me. So often, I give in. It's just easier to sink into the pain, let it win. It is stronger than I am. I can't fight it all the time, so I stay in bed, cover my head with my dark comforter, blocking out all the light of the world I can't face. And I sob. It's a sob that has no beginning and no end. These tears are a force deep within my body that I cannot control. It is raw energy, a power unlike anything I thought this small body was capable of. It is a force that will surely rip me apart.
Even when I don't give in, the pain refuses to leave me alone. It follows me relentlessly. It chains itself to me, wrapping its tentacles around my chest or forming a collar around my throat. It looks like the Rancor -- giant, menacing, slobbering, and single-mindedly focused on destroying me. My destruction is its sole purpose. I walk around with this mammoth beast following me everywhere, looming over everything I do, casting its horrible shadow everywhere I go, but no one else can see it. The woman at the knitting store can't see that 5 minutes before I walked in, that pain was choking me in the car and that as soon as I leave it will hit me full-force in the face. I am like a battered woman, silently urging the cashier to wonder why I haven't removed my sunglasses, willing her to see what is wrong with my eyes, hoping she will be my savior, that she will magically know the key to slaying this beast once and for all. People who pass me on the street don't see my tormentor, they aren't obstructed by his presence. The driver in the car next to me doesn't see my captor, holding me as a prisoner in my own car. My friends can't see that even on a pleasant night out, the pain sits right behind me, toying with me, jerking on that chain, until it has had enough of my insolent refusal to acknowledge its presence and fully envelops me.
Sometimes I think I have eluded the pain, slipped out of its grasp, broken free from its chain. I feel light, airy, hopeful, even happy for a minute or an hour. I take joy at playing with my sweet pup or relish the feeling of the sun on my face. A song on the radio inspires a car sing-along or a conversation makes me double over in laughter. But then I turn a corner and run right into it, with all the force of a head-on collision on the highway. It is denser, more solid, more painful than I had remembered. On these occasions, the pain hits me from all sides, never letting up until I have submitted once more. It wants to flatten me and it is not satisfied until I am on the ground, unable to breathe, unable to move. It wants to punish me for thinking I could escape. It needs to remind me who is in charge.
I am exhausted from carrying this pain around. My neck is sore, my back aches, my lungs are on fire. I feel like my heart will explode from the effort. I am desperate for a break, a respite from carrying this burden. I need this pain to leave me alone, find a new victim, just go away. I must destroy this pain once and for all, but I am terrified that I cannot destroy the pain without destroying myself. I am more terrified that in my darkest moments, the moments when the pain holds me so tightly I cannot see anything else, I feel like that is a price I am willing to pay.
