Pain is such a strange thing. It can sit with you, stagnant and heavy, or flow through you, shifting yet never leaving. Agony. Misery. Torment. Smarting. Distress. Words fail to capture it fully.
Even pain that seems similar can feel entirely different. When my grandfather died, a pang settled in my soul. When it was time to say goodbye to my grandmother, the ache went a step deeper, a tier under torture. Losing her felt like a part of my own soul had been ripped away; one I hadn’t realized I needed until it was gone.
I lost my brother far too early. The hollow that remains is still raw, still jagged. He will never see his children grow, never witness milestones we take for granted. One of them just graduated high school. My pain is different from my parents’; they buried a child. Their grief is a storm I cannot fully inhabit, though I feel its distant thunder. Thirteen years later, his name still breaks them.
Love and heartbreak take their own forms of pain. I’ve been divorced twice. The first tore at my heart over what my children would lose, over the love that couldn’t last. The second brought anxiety that left my body shaking at the sight of papers and signatures. Pain wears many masks.
The body has its own language. Chronic ovarian cysts bring me to my knees in seconds. Herniated discs whisper, or sometimes scream, through every movement. Broken bones leave marks, yes, but less than the weight of a body in constant rebellion. Once, an ATV accident left me with a concussion, a broken nose, and a shattered maxilla. Compared to that, some chronic pains are subtler, but no less cruel.
Some wounds linger unseen. Mental and emotional pain can echo long after the body has healed, a dull ache beneath the surface that never fully disappears. Pain is psychological and physical, tangible and ghostly, silent and deafening. It is constant and fleeting, a companion we neither choose nor control.
And yet, even in its many forms, pain is part of the quiet moments too, reminding us of what it means to feel, to endure, and to notice the small sparks of grace that flicker in between.
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