A Word that Rhymes with Rain

and what it wants

Pain is homeless in the city of my body.

This is a rent-free, mortgage-free terrain. It could take up residence anywhere it chose.

But pain likes to keep its options open.

Pain wants to remain a sovereign citizen. To keep moving, to choose when and how it relocates, not to be discovered by law enforcement and moved on against its will or locked in a cell so the rest of the city can pretend it doesn't exist and appear more palatable to visitors.

Pain can relocate without relocating at all. It can spread itself like smog across the entire skyline, reaching its tendrils into every higgledy piggledy bone-formed street and blackening the walls of every rickety building. Or it can pitch its tent in one spot, hammering those pegs into the soil real good.

Your joints are the street corners where it likes to hang out. Don't make eye contact with it as you pass, it might try to sell you something.

Pain visits the grocery shop and scrawls warning signs on every food item on the shelf. Inflammatory! Bloating! Your cycle will be a nightmare if you eat me!

Pain visits the gallery and hurls dollops of red paint at the walls, skewing your vision of even the most intricate works of art. Looks at you with a smug smile that says: well, without me what would hang here?

Pain visits the bookshop, waits in the floorboards and slides up into your ankles, your knees, your hips, your shoulders, if you linger too long. Whisper-screams in your ear as you read the same sentence on the back cover over and over again.

Pain hops on the city bus to take a tour and make sure it hasn't missed any good spots. Your nerve highways and artery carriageways glow as it zips about.

Pain makes you wonder if maybe you're just hungry.

If maybe you're just sleepy.

If maybe you're just wearing the wrong shoes or thinking the wrong thoughts or shouldn't be carrying books with you everywhere you go. If maybe that extra bit of padding you gathered around your middle is the culprit. If your body is just buckling under the weight of your mounting failures.

If maybe you're doing the wrong exercises. Or, doing the exercises wrong. Doing everything wrong? Pain is simply an indicator of the inherent faultiness that is you.

If maybe you're just crazy, like that doctor said with his eyes that one time you brought it up. Or maybe he didn't. How can you be sure? You are, after all, possibly crazy.

Pain takes on the face of the person who said: “you probably just need to strengthen your core.”

Pain takes on the voice of the person who said: “those are only for people in severe pain. You can have these."

Pain takes on the demeanour of the person who said, with a chortle: "sure you're too young for that!"

You have turned pain into a person it is not.

Really all it says is listen, listen.

Listen to what? Funny thing is, pain is not obliged to answer.

Pain answers with fog.

Pain invites you, with a jolt or a stab or an ache, to dive in search of an answer only to resurface empty-handed and say "I'm so sorry, could you repeat that last part?"

And now pain takes the shape of the person who said, with an eye roll: "you just weren't listening." Somehow pain gets high on background noise, somehow pain mixes up the signals of what you are and aren't supposed to be focusing on.

It gets high on the lights in the supermarket or the person who won't stop playing videos with no headphones on the bus or the man you don't know who's shouting because he's angry at someone who isn't you.

Pain is an email left half-written in your drafts while you roll around on a muscle release ball.

Pain is a pepper left half-chopped while you read an article about something you won't remember afterwards.

Pain asks you to take a deep breath.

You thank it for reminding you.

Then it asks you again.

And again.

Pain is angry with you for some reason, but you're not sure what you did to upset it and you're pretty sure you're the one who should be angry.

Pain wants to draw a picture of an alien-swamp-mutant to describe why you're worried about doing something, but you're not very good at drawing so you don't bother trying to explain. Pain's tendency to elude answers has left you too susceptible to other people's doubt.

You are, after all, possibly crazy.

But then, with that cheeky grin, pain says: I dare you not to believe in me. I dare you to ignore me.

Pain is your enigmatic collaborator. Some days you can dance with it. Some days it is a stubborn child who stamps its feet and doesn't want to go to school.

Pain wants out of this city. To seep out through the hard, unmalleable surfaces your body has become a mirror of.

Some days you think maybe if you lived by the sea you could be friends.

Float together, yield together. When you are weightless, when you lose control to the gentle undulations of the tide, the fog lifts and you can hear things. The water drowns everything except you.

You thought pain wanted to drown you.

But pain wanted to drown everything except you.

This piece is a response to What Pain Wants, the opening essay in Sonya Huber's Pain Woman Takes Your Keys.