"All that pain, that misery, that loneliness, and it just made him kind." - Amy Pond, Doctor Who, season 5, episode 2, "The Beast Below" written by Steven Moffat
Pain sits on a chest too frail to lift it, its mouth split by teeth. it digs curved claws into sinew and bone and untwists nerves where they lie blank in its hands. Misery, hollow cheeked and hollowed bare, keeps its stomach concave, starving for company. A rattle in your lungs. Weeping sores on your skin.
What are you thinking? What are you feeling?
It hurts.
What are you thinking? What are you learning?
Make for me a map of the starving thing shredding your muscles. Hold open the puncture wounds, and pull out the claws.
Or else leave them in and let them fester. Watch your skin go blue and yellow, watch the flesh swell where they lay buried somewhere deep inside of you. Feel your tongue grow heavy and drop down your esophagus. Won't you lift your head?
Pain pulls from your head every thought before it's formed. Pain threads a needle from the spool of your words and stitches closed your lips. Tiny, and neat, a surgeon's touch. Pain takes your hands and holds them, fast and steady. Let me teach you, it says, and presses its splintering bones into the skin of your back.
What are you feeling? What are you learning?
It hurts.
-oh, my darling. pain doesn't have anything to teach. it just hurts.
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on pain
jacqui germain when the ghosts come ashore: “questions for the woman i was last night” (via @godsopenwound) \\ james frey a million little pieces \\ janet fitch white oleander \\ fernando pessoa the book of disquiet (dir. margaret jull costa) \\ maggie nelson bluets (via @kafk-a) \\ albert camus notebooks 1935-1942 (tr. philip thody) (via @tamsoj)
kofi
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The joy you lived through might have been temporary, but so is this sadness. Perspective is everything and nothing lasts forever. That happy moment might be gone, but it doesn't mean the sadness will last forever and that no more joy will ever come your way. Pain is there to be felt so we can react to it, so please remember to sit with your feelings but not to dwell on it so much you forget to do something to relief that pain a little, to change things around. We have a tendency to get absorbed in pain and to believe that it is all we will ever feel, but it isn't. We can feel so much more, we can live through so much more, and even though it is sad that life is fleeting, it also means that this suffering won't last forever, it won't be all that you have. We all have ups and downs, please don't let the frustration of being in pain make you believe it is all you have and all you will ever feel. Keep going. You will find joy again. 🌱
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— Mary Oliver, Love Sorrow
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