have you ever?

Have you ever had someone rip your arm out of its socket? The pain is exquisite. Excruciating. You want to pass out, but it won’t let you. Every molecule in your head screaming for sweet, sweet relief but relief eludes you. Your senses are filled, replaced by the pain that is none of them. It is a sense of its own. Sight is blurred. Sound is ringing. Only that of pain, of your heart that is threatening to burst, and of the silent screams that escape you. Smell, the blood throbbing through your nostrils. Tangy, metallic blood. You can taste it on your tongue. You feel the sensations that accompany pain, and those that stay longer after it has gone. The senses are dulled, and precise. The pain maybe be temporary but it wrenches the velvet curtains of time from their hangs and shreds them to make seconds feel like an eternity. The pain makes you feel you are drowning, and doing irrational things is the only response. Animal things. Rational, maybe. You claw at your head feeling like you can tear it out. You can not. But you try anyways. You need to feel like you can do something about it. You can’t.

Have you ever had someone rip your arm out of its socket? The pain is delicate. Flavorful. Packed with a punch, pardon the pun. It is a feast. A cruella de ville of flavors. A hundred and one different sensations. All of them burning up your identity in different ways. First goes your body, then your mind, then your soul. The monks of mount hei believe that to achieve enlightenment, you must exhaust your body. Then when your body is spent, exhaust your mind. When the mind has no more to give, exhaust your soul. When the soul has fled, there is space in the vessel that is your body for enlightenment. It is a pithy, wonderful thing to believe in. They are wrong. When the pain exhausts it all, when you have no more strength to give, there is no enlightenment. There is darkness in empty corridors. There is loneliness. Who do you trust? Who can you trust? When those that were supposed to be your own have abandoned you, who do you turn to?

Your darkness is absolute, your weakness is pure. Clean. You are separated from the herd, in part by ostracism and in part by your own isolation.

Have you ever had someone rip your arm out of its socket? The pain doesn’t leave you. Not then. Not decades later. Even when they put it back together, even when no one can tell that it was ever wrenched out, even when to the world, the carefully created image of a perfect home seems true, it doesn’t go. You know. They know. The pain doesn’t leave you. Not then. Not decades later. The ghost of the pain stays by your shoulder, poking it for giggles, the cheeky poltergeist. You’re too in love with the memory of pain to let it go.