Full Circle

It is 12am, I have just swallowed two white tablets that in 45 minutes will cease the wrenching agony currently twisting through my gut, making balloon animals out of my intestines. Unfortunately they will also dismiss any chances of healthy sleep I have for this evening, and possibly incapacitate me for much of tomorrow. As I wait I write. Ok here is what chronic pain is like: It is like remembering you have something very important to remember but having no idea what it is. It is like fumbling your last cigarette when you've just found a light. It is like taking a piss in a dream only to realise five minutes later that you still need desperately need a piss. It is staring into a 100w bulb, unable to look away, knowing the switch is just out of reach. It is something you cannot forget, but there are times when you are not sure you remember. It becomes a part of you, integral, its absence unimaginable, you become suspended, on constant edge, existing in unequilibrium. Then all of a sudden you cannot decide if you feel pain or not, you question whether it is/was all a mere trick of the nerve endings, neural misfirings, shadows in the dark of your head. There are times when you lay there each night clutching your stomach as the pain turns you inside out and sucks you away from the inside and you begin to think you are going crazy and if this doesn't stop soon you really will go crazy and why the fuck can this not stop hurting for one fucking minute it has not stopped for two fucking years now, two years of non-stop pain no break from it no pause and the constant ache is burrowing inside me like an insect, like a whole sea of insects, scarabs clawing and tearing into my stomach with their pincers and jaws and now i am thinking about it and i am focusing on that spot of white light that burning vacuum inside of me growing bigger drawing me into one point folding me over and is this real? this is in my head right, this isn't real physical pain, this stopped hurting years ago my pain sensors are just stuck on go, i can't turn them off, fuck i can't turn them off. And as I sit here editing and re-editing these words the wave hits me, a wall of muffled silence, and the pain floats away. I gaze through the thick fog, losing coordination, my fingers becoming too heavy to type with. It is so much better and so much worse.

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