The Pain of Change

Months have passed, dust has gathered and posts have not been forthcoming, but I will not ramble about wherefores and why.  Instead I will talk about something else entirely:

 

Pain.  Pain is something we all know, or at least think we know.  I thought I knew it, pain.  I thought it was a thing accompanying me throughout this life, scalding me and teaching me, reminding me of failures and showing me what not to do.  I have been beaten and battered like so many others, fallen foul of accident and malevolence.  I have broken things, sliced things, burned more parts of me that I care to mention, trimmed the ends of digits with poorly wielded kitchen knives and experienced (far more times than I am comfortable admitting) my share of full-body electrocutions.  I thought I knew pain, how it looked and felt, of what it tasted and smelled.  I thought I knew what it did to you, what it made me think and how it made you act.

I was completely wrong.

By and large, pain is a thing of moments.  You may break a leg, a thing that hurts like so many shades of hell, but the worst pain, the locus of your suffering, is that first moment as the snap rings through your body and your brain has a chemical fit.  A brightness explodes within you, rushing out via your lungs, but it is as though that release, that expulsion, cleanses you of the worst of it, driving the sharpness away.  You may cut yourself, tearing apart skin and tissue, but the ache you feel afterwards is dull, wrapped in haze and uncertainty, the initial burst already becoming nothing more than memory.

Pain is brief and pain fades.

But pain does not have to be like that; pain can be so much more.  Pain can wake you up so violently that you are halfway across your bedroom before you even know who you are.  It stabs at you, piercing you, sending a blinding wave of heat and acid and nausea rushing through you, lighting up your whole body, your whole mind, from one small spot on your chest.  You claw at it, seeking to grab hold, to cradle it, to squeeze it, knowing that just your own touch can bring the pain down, lower the heat, reduce the torment, but you can’t reach.  The pain is inside you, and the pain is not letting go.

You try to breathe through to, try to relax, all your years of experience shouting that its “just a pain”, it cannot go on forever; but it does.  It rises, higher than you realised possible, dancing and swirling, hammering at you, concussing you with its fury, pulling at you without relent, without mercy, without consideration.  You adjust, you steady yourself, you breathe through it once more, but again it rises.  After an hour you don’t even realise you are crying as your hands spasmodically scrabble at your chest.  After two hours you begin to panic, the waves rolling over you one after another, relentless and apparently inexhaustible.  After three, you don’t know time any more, cannot say when it began, cannot imagine it can end.  After four you hear the begging, coming in gibbering streams, the words meaningless and hollow, pleading with the universe that it has to stop, uncertain if it is you speaking the words.  After five, you doubt yourself and all around you, the light seeming sickly and unreal, the person holding you, steeped in panic, as distant as an actor on the screen, the hollow sound of your animal wails as unconnected as everything else…

 

Eventually it stops, the ball of nightmares lifting away from your chest, the sound returning to the world as your eyes finally find focus…but nothing is the same.  Your mind cannot stop its thoughts: Has it gone?  Did it really end?  You don’t trust your senses, don’t believe what they are trying to report as your hands still twitch wildly in your lap, your back ever so slightly rocking you to and fro as your eyes slip and slide around the room, the cornered animal within you still fully expecting its next beating.  You try to explain, you try to verbalise what you went through, but you cannot; how could you, for you have no clue what happened yourself.  You were visited by something, touched by a force, and that force changed you.  Days go by and you still cannot snap out of, cannot pull away from the end of the nightmare, the part that grips you just before you wake, where everything has turned to surreality and all that you see is blurred and terrifying, filled with a waiting, unseen darkness.  Wrapped tightly on your couch, you wait; wait for the next beating that you fear is due.  How far can you move without triggering it?  How much can you do with without inviting your tormentors return?  Without knowing the cause, without understanding what happened, how can you avoid your fate this time?

But no answers come and you must wait, wait for the passing of hours, of days, of weeks and of months, until you realise you are no longer afraid…but of course, the pain was waiting too, and it is no more merciful the second time…

(Writers note:  This was not done for empathy nor for sympathy, but expressly as an exorcism.  To be able to describe the trauma you faced is to be able to look at it without emotion.  Only then can recovery begin.  Normal service will be resumed shortly…)