“Pain--has an Element of Blank--
It cannot recollect.
When it began--or if there were
A time when it was not--”
-Emily Dickinson
It hurts. It always hurts. It is an endless song of suffering, playing through the annals of history. It is an ache that echoes through time immemorial, an ache that cries for unattainable relief. There is no respite; there is no remedy. The ache is ongoing, yet never beginning, and the panacea for the pain is a panacea of death.
Tombstones silence the elegy of ache. They smash the symphony in grave strokes. They bury the instruments and the choir of pain sings no more, but at what cost does it do so? The song stops for one person, but the symphony has a much greater audience, and with each passing moment, a new listener is grown from the remains of the old, replenishing the pool of spectators. Buddhists believe that all life is suffering, and the song is sang in cycles, a tenet no truer today than ages ago. Life transpires in a loop, and pain is an eternal constant. It existed before its observers, and lives long after they’ve perished, until one day, it alone echoes across the cosmos.
Opportunities missed are the saddest of all aches. They cry out like woodpecker beaks, thumping in reverberant what if’s. This hurt bears into the mind, and drills empty holes with unyielding sadness as it replays memories over and over, altered with dimmer light and unflattering music. These lost options remind us that life walks in twisted roads, and many plans are laid to rest at the foot of chaos. Those whose eyes peer at the past are the most prone to this kind of ache. Nostalgia is not just a fondness of what happened, it is a longing for what could have happened.
Moments are made by choices, and choices are made by people. Decisions require thought and care, and their consequences are never certain. A career is chosen in the interminable time it takes us to don a cap and gown, and a family is built in the span of a lifetime. But in the instances between micro-decisions, there’s no time to blather on about shoulds and principles, only the silent certainty given to viscera, the primal sensations our bodies undergo when faced with the choice between “yes” and “no,” and I...would often choose the latter.
In those instances, the body doesn’t know that “yes” or “no” could be the difference between something as trivial as breakfast that morning or something as significant as a first kiss. All it knows in those brief moments is fear, fear and pain, always pain.
