Pain

When you have a pain so large that it drowns out all other thoughts, feelings, emotions.
A pain so persistent that it keeps you awake at night and drowns you during the day.
A pain that threatens to explode your skull open.
While simultaneously pushing in so hard that you feel isolated from the world as if you're watching it on a screen.
A pain that is so constant that the brief relief that drugs bring is a shock to the system, and the price for that relief is too high.
But all the time it is a round pain, a cool pain, one that nags constantly and pushes your awareness out of the world. As if you're living in a bubble....

It pushes in front of your senses, interrupting you as you process thoughts.
Threatening to dissolve your peace of mind into a shadow of what it was.
Slicing up your dreams and wants and needs and always, always, forcing itself to the top of your priorities.
Until the simple effort of trying to focus past the pain exhausts you and you can resist it no more so you succumb to its pressure.

And even in sleep there is no escape, for when you cannot rationalise the pain consciously, your mind tries to give other reasons for the suffering.
And so you dream, all your nightmares come to the surface.
In bright Technicolor and surround sound.
And while your senses are muted by day, in your dreams they go into overdrive – So you can taste the mud,
And hot blood in your mouth,
And smell the rats that come to nibble at you clothes when you can't move to get away from them...
So you can hear the gunshot,
And watch the woman's heart explode,
And feel the warm rain of her blood,
And the dead weight of her body crashing down on you,
Suffocating you with its closeness,
Wrapping itself around you until there is no way to turn, no way to escape it.

And while even in the worst nightmares, you always wake up before you die – before you hit the ground or before the car crashes...
But you cannot – and so every night you experience a death – your own or otherwise. In too-bright colour and electronically accurate sound, chemically synthesised smells and tastes and all feelings amplified to unnatural levels...
Until you dread night and sleeping, knowing what lies in wait for you behind the false comfort of unconsciousness.

And so to bring yourself out of the bubble that pain puts you into, you cut.
The white–hot shock snaps you back into the world.
It is a reminder that you are still alive, however much it doesn't feel that way, however detached from reality you get.

It is not a relief.
Not an adrenaline rush.
Just a shock that there is worse pain than the pain in your head.
Even if scars heal and disappear in a few weeks and the pain you seek to escape has shadowed you for so long....
But for the brief instant that the cut is new and raw, there is a pain that you can cope with.
Because you know that cuts will heal and that your pain will not.

A kind of therapy.
Being able to watch one kind of pain fade and disappear.
It helps to remember that there was once a time before the pain.
Before the totalitarian effort of trying to reach out from behind it and live began.

But the only relief from the pain that you have found is so damaging that people are shocked and disgusted.
They turn away and change the subject when you ask for help.
And you are asking for help.
And so you must pretend that everything is fine, and carry on smiling and working as if nothing is wrong.
Even though it is becoming hard for you to find what is right.
And you promise to the people that you love the most not to do it again.
Knowing as you say the words that you have just destroyed the only comfort you can get.

And now you are back to the beginning.
And as long as you have no new marks people assume you are fine, but the truth is you couldn't be worse.
And all the time the pain pounds in the background,
Like a wave on a rock,
Until you realise that no rock can withstand the waves forever
And you begin to wonder when and where the cracks will appear...
And the pain roars constantly,
Like a white-hot light,
Slicing through your mind,
Grinding up your reasons why.
So that every move and every breath and every heartbeat just causes another wave of pain.
Until you don’t want to move, don’t want to breathe, don't want to be.
Until the thing you want more than anything is for it to stop.
Until you want it more than life itself.
Until you just want to stop completely.
Until there's no more pain...