Method of Mancy

Every thought I have brings me pain. Every thought I don’t have brings some more. Everything I do, everything I don’t. Pain, pain, pain. Permeating through each cell at every moment. All-encompassing. Infinite. Pain.

I’m drenched in it. If it were corporeal it would be coming off me in waterfalls, leaving flash floods in my wake. Every breath, every blink, every second: pain. Time means nothing. I can’t differentiate one minute from the next; they all feel exactly the same. I’m almost bored. 

I can’t escape for even the briefest of flashes; it’s always there. Sometimes I think maybe if I’m not conscious, I won’t feel it. But it continues through the night, haunting my dreams like a filter over the image distorting everything I see. It’s a nonstop noise, punctuated with physical manifestations that burn me from the inside or pierce right through the organs. I don’t bother toying with escapism anymore. I let every dull and droning moment bury itself underneath my skin, feel every minute slice through me. 

Pain, pain, pain. Every second, every day. Inescapable. Infinite. Pain.

I become spacey and spoon-eyed, like a prisoner humming along to the blaring alarm that shattered her mind. Everything hurts. Every day is the same. I attain a sinister almost-harmony with the agony, a synchronicity, a fusion. I am pain. Pain is me. The world is pain. I am pain so the world is me. We are one and the same. We all melt together into a bucket of misery and I let the madness medicate me with a numbness that is anything but.

Now that time has dissolved, everything happens at once. In the same moment my eyes glaze over and I melt away, I’m forced back into awareness, screaming myself out of the daze as I feel everything anew in full force. I turn my face away from a coworker as tears stream down onto the desk. I muffle the shrieks that claw their way out of me after dark. I collapse to the ground, stare meaninglessly up at the ceiling as my body shakes and think, This is fair. This is what I get for what I’ve done. 

Because it makes perfect sense. Taking the hardest blow with the least armor could only sire the greatest pain. That was my choice. Despite the odds, despite the risks, I walked into the battlefield not just naked but flayed. I stood quivering with a face no one but me had ever seen laid bare. Never more exposed, never so true–a gift I was so sure I would never learn how to give. No hiding. No mask. Just me. Really, really me… 

My mind has gone now–it’s out the window with the loose change of all the alleged minutes/hours/days that have passed that I can’t compute. My body–taken over by the roiling agony undulating in my bones. I’ve never hurt so much; I can hardly comprehend it. But even as my body shudders and I fight to breathe, I know I would do it again. I would do it again and again and again. I would strip back every last layer to reveal the creature inside that is truly me. I would crash onto the ground in raw muscle and I would offer the blade myself, knowing what it would bring. Knowing that this is what I get. Knowing I’ll risk it all and lose anyway. 

Because for one moment, one impossible moment, I was really there. Really me. I existed as only-truly-me for the very first time in the eye of someone else. And finally, in his gaze and in his arms, I wasn’t alone. For just one impossible moment, I was no longer alone.