There is no creed that makes pain less painful

All that exists owes its life to all that is no more. Each passing moment is a martyr for the next, just as pain is our debt to joy. There’s no wisdom or faith that makes pain less painful. It must hurt if anything is to matter: your life depends on it.

So stop. Your sorrow chases you: turn toward it. Watch it catch up. It will not pounce and end you. You will not lose more than you already have.

Grief is your mother. Let her feed you, for grief is the food your soul was made to eat. It digests pain into life itself. Your soul knows how to break pain down into its parts, which are the same nutrients that combine to make purpose and awe and laughter. You don’t have to do anything, just as your stomach knows what to do with meat and potatoes. Turnips have birthed poetry — consciousness — war crimes — human drama. Pain birthed the chance at eking out a living at all.

Stop starving yourself. This hunger strike never prevented the bad things from happening, and your numbness slips into dissolution as you cease to exist.

So greet your sorrow. Make room for it at your table. Accept the dish it offers and break bread for you both.

Grief is here. Grief, your mother who loved you. Eat, weep, and see tomorrow. Nourished, you will survive; one day you will have enough strength to give as thanks.

[Prose]

She cleared off her writing desk, jaw clenched with effort, and resented that she should feel so at odds with everything. 

“What of the future?” her mind groaned anxiously again. 

“Oh, what of it?” she bickered with herself. “That old man? The future, as far as one can foresee, is but the withered end, where all dreams dry up under hungering winds of remembering. The future longs for old ways passed by and lacks all forward drive.”

She felt some cruelty in her judgment, but tempered it with a tithing of pity. 

“Only the present moves. It deserves our full focus if we’re to care about navigating it at all.” 

Satisfied, she sat deliberately, her desk more enticing now by being bare. 

“Tomorrow is silent, only capable of eternal submission. Now is the place from which to rule.” 

She set out a book and leafed it to a blank page, then inked a fountain pen with measured movements. All the while she listened carefully to stray thoughts and fragments of feeling. These vagrants rolled through her as morning fog in hilly pastures, so she noted each expression and let them pass.

“Would thee fight flame with a knife?” she wrote neatly, then sighed a blade-crossed breath. 

Self-governance required both the servant and the queen, she thought and nodded once, a bow and an order given simultaneously. Then she pursed her lips and gently turned the still-wet page.

Victimology

You just don’t feel like a victim at nine or ten, you feel strange on those long summer nights when you can’t sleep, and it’s hot, and you’re touching your chest the way he touched you. Sadness eats you, but you don’t understand, you think maybe you want him to touch you again. Maybe this time it would be okay. It feels like your idea, so you don’t think you’re a victim at all.

You’re a kid but you feel like you’re a million years old. Your own emotions and desires seem alien, the kinds of things that good people don’t talk about. It goes beyond feeling dirty. You feel like you’ve chosen to live in filth.

It’s not a matter of this stuff being your fault. That’s too obvious. Instead, it’s a matter of this stuff being who you are. It’s that deep, it’s that frightening. You don’t realize you’ve been fucked with. You figure you were born this way, born bad. Born sick.

So you grow up, and of course you don’t remember it was all your father’s doing. That he started it. You don’t remember and it barely seems to matter anyway. Your mind’s a cesspool. Your boundaries were never defined in the first place, so how could you feel wronged?

It’s a long summer night. You’re lying in bed awake, hot and hurting. The past is far away, but in a lot of ways you’re still nine years old. Waiting for someone to teach you the right things, the proper boundaries. But no one comes. Your nine year old self is tucked away, unreachable forever. You don’t even know why you’re crying.

When you were young you begged your older sister to kill you. You lay on the floor clutching a stuffed animal, crying, begging her to step on your fragile throat and end it all. You can’t remember why you were so upset, back then.

You can’t remember why those empty threats flung recklessly to the backseat of the car — the ones about orphanages and abandonment — always seemed so thrilling, so attractive.

You feel shattered, but you don’t remember what you looked like when you were whole.

Were you ever? And what would healing even mean, if there was healing to be had? You already know how to quiet your crying. How to live when you’d rather not. How to linger when you want to run away. But you don’t know how to honour yourself.

Not when who you are is what he made you.

On Hiatus

I’m taking a break. I need to place my focus inward and find Spirit there. I need to write more personal things too. I’m beginning to write the story of me.

Its prelude goes something like this:

Love crosses a no-man’s-land with both hands up. It doesn’t matter who’s involved; every caress leaves a scar if you’ve got the eyes for it, as every touch disturbs atoms, molecules, cells. When you are a lover you give like a wound. When you’re a child you’re mostly lungs, expecting everything to come as quickly as the air, and when you’re too young to know you’re a self at all, you’re a solider who can’t tell a bullet from a kiss. Some kisses are bullets indeed.

And oh, how I wanted to be shot.

What does that make me? Soldiers aren’t called victims. Perhaps if they were, they’d be called murderers too. 

I was young.