Living With What I Am

What is it about pain that makes it stick around years, even decades, after the cause has left?

I am, of course, talking about the injuries we suffer within. But maybe not only.

In my life I have broken several bones. On cold days I have two fingers and a thumb which will throb. My knees hurt. My shoulder recalls healing from when it was separated.

The pain is there. All of these injuries took place thirty years ago. Or more. When I was young. Thin. Strong. Filled with endurance. I went to battle on athletic fields, tested myself climbing trees and rocks, and blazed through the obstacle course faster than anyone else because I faced it with reckless abandon. And now, decades after those events have become nothing more than faint memories the pain returns to haunt me.

Still, sometimes I would that pain is nothing compared to the pain I have taken inside.

But what kind of failing is it to suffer years afterward over rejections which no longer matter? Why should it matter now, thirty years after the fact, that I never told VB how I felt until the day we said goodbye? Or that EL basically told me F--- off? Or LB had me convinced we were to be married, only to learn I was something to be played with? Or BN that I mattered, only to learn I was just a possession?

Why doesn't the reality of what I have wash away the pain of what I lost, or never had?

Probably it has something to do with why my fingers and knees ache over failed efforts from just as long ago. Why my skin remains a discolored reminder of my encounter with the sharp object and the searing oven.

Pain is always with us, isn't it? The hurts of arthritis, twisting on our joints. The loneliness of rejection. And something as simple as weather can bring it all alive again.

How strange. But I think it might make me a better writer. I think so. Don't know.

I'm just feeling lonely today.

Peabo Bryson: If Ever Your In My Arms Again