The Best Thing about Being in Pain

I sat by myself in our apartment’s balcony and stared at the vast city skyline. The night sky was blanketed with stars, the city aglow with lights from towering buildings. Quite a sight to behold, really, if only I didn’t feel like crying…

I held myself in check and forced the tears back in. I tried to focus – stared at the sky, willed myself to look for a constellation or anything of interest to no avail. I was staring but unseeing… Unseeing but still feeling… At this time of the night, everything seemed quiet and at peace. Everything but my heart… I shivered but not from the cold. I shivered from the emptiness within.

Loss had always been a painful experience but if there were successive losses, the pain could become too much. It could get unbearable even for a strong person like me. If those successive losses too happened at even frequent intervals, then that unbearable pain either became consuming or transcendent. And the former was happening to me now, no matter how fervently I wished for the pain to teach me to tolerate it more so I could exceed my normal pain threshold and in the process, move on.

Sometimes, I just wished I would go numb but no matter how much I tried, the pain just wouldn’t go away. There were times too when I wished that it’s not the pain but you who would go away. You whom I thought were different from them. How ironic that I lost you but the love that I so wanted to lose remained in me, festering like some wound that refused to heal. I was being haunted by the memories that I wanted to get away from, tortured by the very reason for my happiness not quite long ago.

I could really go on ranting and raving and getting all vexed about this whole pain thing but you know what, just looking up at the dark sky, with clouds sometimes obscuring my view of the stars and even the moon, I just realized that life’s pretty much the same – it could get dark and gloomy but there would always be something to brighten it. I just needed to see beyond the hindrance. The night sky had its stars and the moon, with the moon giving the brightest luminescence but even the smallest star could give some illumination, right?

I may have felt kind of hopeless and empty but the fact that I was feeling and hurting meant that I cared. And you know what’s best? It’s the fact that the best thing about being in pain was my not being dead. I lived and I’d go on fighting. I would definitely survive this like I survived my past losses.

There’s a flicker of hope in me. Just a tiny flicker, like a tiny star in the vast city skyline, but a flicker nonetheless…

I had been holding on to this pain, holding it in for so long that it had somehow consumed me. Now I knew better…

And so I let go and let this pain transcend.




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written on October 2007