An Introduction to Pain
How badly are you hurting? Please identify
your pain by weight and measure it from
end to end, please rank the force and
flavor of this guest that’s wedged itself into
your life. Your memories of pain won’t
help you, since the hurt you’ve been
ignoring is a slippery, constant, keening
thing that’s in between your bones and
underneath your fingernails and in your
skin and woven tightly through the minutes of
your day. Familiar reference points are
useless here, but still: Try to remember how
you would have ranked these moments, if
you’d only known the scale of one-to-ten
back when the pain was seated in your lap:
the broken toe, the day your mentor
died, your surgery that went a little
wrong, the afternoon of waiting for
the phone to ring (you wondered if
he’d made it out alive), ballet en pointe
(the time your toenail cracked right
down the middle), falling off
your bike and landing hard and hitting
gravel, falling off the wagon, reading through
her emails even though you knew
already, biting deep into your lip to
keep from saying something that would
make him yell, the sound the deadbolt
made behind you after she had closed
the door. The knee you skinned, it
wasn’t half so bloody as it felt, but there
was no one who was willing to acknowledge
how it hurt, and no one there to tell you
it would be okay, so you just sighed and put
the bandage on yourself.
Remember how these wounds were
things you knew would fade with
time, would weather into memories,
would be the pain you lived through
moved past walked away from, don’t
forget the way you recognized
those injuries as things that time
would settle into scars. That pain
was not like this, it wasn’t every moment,
every day and every step and every
shallow breath, it wasn’t like this constant
passenger you’ve gathered.
Now: on a scale from one
to ten, describe the way
it feels to know that this
will never be a memory
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