Fault Lines
Pain doesn’t write pretty poetry
*TW: Implied self-harm
Fault lines
Pain doesn’t write pretty poetry
It’s midnight and I’m in my water closet of a bathroom seeking relief that the warm needling of hot water on skin may offer thinking how there was a time I never understood what it meant when someone described waves of pain washing over them or said that pain radiated from wherever they’d been punched. Shot. Stabbed. But now I do.
Maybe if I stab myself a little bit, I’ll distract myself long enough to get this train wreck of thoughts under control and send them off in a direction that doesn’t end with me twisting in the darkness of my own mind but I can’t because the pain is…God the pain…
Suddenly, I’m thinking about that stupid TikTok challenge with the period pain simulator and I’m laughing bitterly because I just want to turn this off just for a minute or two or forever but the pain is radiating out from that spot low on my abdomen and I can feel my knees shaking from how I’ve locked my legs against the sympathetic cramping in my thighs and I’m swallowing to keep the bile down because I know if it gets that far I will collapse but at least the cold of the floor will help cool my clammy skin and maybe I can close my eyes for a little bit and everything will just…stop.
Stop for just a minute so I can breathe and so I am digging my fingers into the cold tiles beside me trying to leech the coolness through my skin and along the nerve endings that are burning their way through my flesh and I’m trying not to breathe too deep so I don’t feed the flames but with fire comes smoke and now it’s billowing through me softer than the flames but choking my thoughts and now the salt I taste on my lips changes and it’s not sharp and angry like that cheap stuff you can buy at any supermarket, now its older and richer and mellowed by the passing of a thousand tears.
And now I’m remembering another time I felt pain like this where it radiated out from a single spot and my cheeks were so pale that if I stood still, I would fade into the tiles beside me, only that time it wasn’t biological, it was man-made or rather it was biological in that it was my father who dealt the crippling blow that this tidal wave of pain still threatening to drag me under is making me remember.
But I hang on and keep trying to breathe because that’s what I do, I just put my head down and do whatever needs doing such as breathing even when I am dying inside just keep going like that time I told him I was going to be a lawyer and he replied that he was worried because he kept imagining getting a call that I need to be bailed out of jail and I can remember burying the stabbing pain like a thousand swords driving themselves through my heart down behind the confusion because aren’t lawyers the ones who get called to get people out of jail and I can remember him speaking so earnestly with concern etched in every line of his face but I couldn’t tell you what he said because the pain…god the pain…
It went roaring through me, drowning out the sound of his voice and I can remember how still I held myself terrified that I would shatter into a million pieces where I sat and I wonder if it wasn’t there on the very cusp of adulthood and I had just barely become a woman when I was still relatively whole despite everything else that had chipped away at the essence of me, I wonder if that wasn’t where he broke me.
Or rather where I broke myself by holding too tightly to the pieces of my soul that wanted to fall to the floor and so instead of a thousand tiny flaws, I cracked my every hope and dream right down the centre because something had to give.
And in that break the words I can remember and those I can’t planted the seed of darkness that I find quietly strangling me over and over again no matter how many times I yank it out forcibly by the roots like my grandmother taught me it comes back growing in that quiet way that weeds do wrapping itself around every thought and every action and the weight dragging me slowly under the quicksand of my own mind where hanging on feels impossible and breathing is hard to do.
But I close my eyes and I breathe and instead of the wall now my fingers are pressed lightly to the spot where the seed of a life-never-was is viciously protesting this turn of events and I’m not sure if I’m shushing it or myself or the dozens that came before it or the dozens still to come that will never be more than seeds tearing themselves from my body because it cannot sustain that role.
And I’ve realised that is probably for the best because aren’t we all bearing the scars of our parents baggage and I don’t think I could bear the burden of knowing I could so fundamentally damage my own flesh and blood that they sit in a shower at 1am and distract themselves from the blunt saw hacking away at their insides by examining the clumsy patchwork of their souls, searching for a fault line with my name inscribed in the break.
