That Casual Word, Pain

 

Art: The Returned

To be sentenced to pain is to be sentenced to time.

It is to serve time.

So obviously there was a crime of some kind, there had to be.

Why else would it hurt so much?

I try to see blood dripping from my withering hands, I try to think back, think, damn it, think, just calm the fuck down and think, think think think. Yet, the blood I struggle to divine just becomes a dark thick honey whenever I attempt this. So I’m basically stuck with a palmful of a dark thick honey, sticky and useless, for no reason whatsoever, not an inch closer to figuring out what the crime actually was.

I remember my other body, the invisible one, a silly flower within a silly flower, the one that always said, “Okay, let’s go, let’s go,” the one that walked freely among the countless minutes. The minutes with no trace of pain, an incessant savage cascade from the sky. That other body moved within the cascade, between water and water, which is certainly impossible, but it moved in a strange calmness, between water and water.

The other body was folded into me and didn’t hurt, it didn’t hurt, it didn’t shiver, it didn’t cry, it didn’t hurt, and no one ever walked away from it. I wasn’t brought to my knees and I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t alone, and people didn’t leave me because of my uneasy flesh and my unlikely bones. Even unseen, my other body radiated a certain suppleness and a terror, and I didn’t have to think about it at all.

There was no distance between us, we didn’t need words, we were one and the same. We wove ourselves in and out of the world, inside and outside, outside the world, outside time.

But one day I came home without it, the cells in my body toppling over into the void. I knew it got trapped somewhere, maybe as I was racing through the city in my sturdy black power wheelchair, maybe it’s still in one of those little coffee shops, maybe I carelessly, fatally, foolishly cast it aside in a momentary occlusion of madness, like a paper tissue or some other small useless thing.

In my room of depth and asceticism, something stirred and I finally sensed time. It wasn’t

measuring anything. There was no purpose to it, except I knew that it came out of my pain. Maybe we got it all wrong and pain came before time, long ago. I mean, who are we kidding? Pain always comes first. The hurt circled through my flesh, it bumped into my cells and scattered them like ashes, and when I tried to lift myself up, I didn’t hear the usual, comforting, “Okay, let’s go.”

In fact, I didn’t hear anything at all, except the ticking of the clock, one timepiece multiplied by a hundred twenty-seven million timepieces. There was neither scarlet nor blue anymore, all colors faded, as time was burrowing into my tiny crippled body. It hurt, and it hurt, and it hurt, and you can’t fit time into a small human body, just like you can’t fit the sky into your bones. I learned that there’s a blood and a prison to all timepieces.

The longer it hurt, the more time I accumulated inside me, until I had so much of it that everything else, just like the colors, slipped into obscurity. Me and time, we were out of joint. A second lasted an hour, a minute lasted a day, and a day lasted the expanse between the cradle and the grave, between the mind’s death and the mind’s exile.

I began to study the black miracles of time, like how it can fit into a common human body or stretch all the way between the lamb and the lion. I checked out a pile of books from a local library, yet I quickly realized that surprisingly little has been written on this matter. The greatest minds kept silent about black miracles, the ones that aren’t really all that terrific. Undeterred, I decided to figure this out myself. I was smart and singularly focused, which is to say, perfect for this task.

As my flesh throbbed with the hurting, I saw time circle and circle around my wounds, I heard it move in the pitch-black of the night, bumping softly into the objects in my room, I felt how it saturated the air, the man-eater.

But, even years later, I was no closer to understanding these black miracles than when I began, except that they are not supposed to happen, that you are not supposed to witness them, that you pay the blood price for each and every one of them, you pay the silver and the iron, the orchid and the dung, you pay the price of the world in its fierce and beautiful brilliance.

A human shattering, I, a beggar queen and a hero without honor, am waiting for someone else’s voice to disrupt the forever-ugly ticking of the clock.

When people hear that you’re in pain, they always assume it’s temporary, it’s inevitably finite, a glitch in the flesh, like an interlude of sunshine on a moist, fragrant orange peel, haunting and beautiful in its thoughtless abandonment. It’s a sprained ankle and a bedrest. No one thinks that true pain goes into the spaces between the minutes, that it is not a passage, but a rope, that it encircles time itself like a noose. Up into the air you go, kicking and twisting, up and up and up.

And as they cancel their visits in an overwhelming, almost endearing casualness, I don’t think they ever realize that I cannot take this continuous duration of timepain, not anymore. I cannot take it, not even for another minute, not without losing the barrier of antique dolls and sacred chimes separating us from a life without hurt and without mercy, the barrier we call the human mind.

How do I make them understand that sometimes hurt is time stripped of all space, all world, and all human voice? Tell me how. For fuck’s sake, tell me how I make them understand.

There’s nothing silent or unspeakable about pain either. It speaks in the language of clocks and their inviolable hideousness, it speaks in the sharp luminous crystals that riddle your wrists and your ribs, the bones of all bones, it speaks in the receding footsteps of those who were once near.

I never gave up on attempting to remember, again and again, what I had done in order to be sentenced to time like this. But I came up empty, the murderess minus the murder. But I think I do know why my invisible strangeflesh that didn’t measure time didn’t cry disappeared one day, just like that. I lost my other body because two sides of one coin cannot exist without each other, yet they cannot be together either. Because to put the two together is to break the coin. Which is to say, my wounded flesh could never be truly together with the other flesh.

I am either the wound or I am the salt. 

Come to think of it, I think I prefer to be the salt, no matter the consequences.

I was young and I didn’t really get that at all. I thought m other body and I were one and the same, I was giddy, irreverent, and free of time, with all the world, crimson and clover, before me. But my other body must’ve fled in terror once it realized that I was so oblivious to its eventual fate, the fool and the shiver.

So the thing is, sometimes there’s no crime.

Sometimes you get the sentence anyway.

Sometimes—

the day

lasts

forever.