“That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.” -John Green, The Fault in our Stars
I ache.
There is a palpable palpitation and a sickness crawling, spiny and pronged. It’s a stirring sludge forced in sharp pulsings upwards ever upwards. My brain swells in the pressure, the sack that holds me together threatens to rip apart and out I would spill. Marbles, lost.
Another trip to the ER, another day spent curled on the aseptic white sheets of a hospital bed. Bruises bloomed all over my body like bouquets of peonies gone wilted and rotten. Pain so severe and heart rate so elevated they feared a heart attack. Truly.
Heart, attach. Please attach. It’s been living in the place between subtle and gross body, that place where my pain lives. That pain which grounds and stabilizes because the floor is the only place we exist, our can exist. Do we exist?
Pain which reveals. The grief that threatens to shred us and remove identity does, in fact, reveal our truest selves.
These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them. -Edna St. Vincent Millay
