Pain

This pain is a cancer.

That line was the skipping record in my brain as I drove away from the airport that awful early July morning of goodbye, leaving my love behind.

The pain felt like a tumor – it was a lump in my throat, my chest that impeded my breathing and left me teetering on the edge of explosion. It felt like a deep, raw wound that would fester and grow and consume me if I didn’t pay it proper attention and care.

Grieving, anguished, sorrowful, brokenhearted, wallowing.

Today the pain feels like a hangover that won’t go away. The kind of hangover you get when you have saturated your body, your blood, your brain with alcohol. The first day you want to die. You cry for your mother and your crimes as you crawl back and forth from the bathroom. Moving beyond that is simply not an option. The second day you’re not as damaged but you are fragile, vulnerable, cautious, aching. I feel like midnight between these days. But there’s no 3rd day relief in sight.

And its a pain that exhausts. And you don't want to feel it and you try to push it down, to think of other things, to avoid it for a few minutes.

But you've already established that this pain is a cancer, and if ignored or even just temporarily set aside, it will boil up uncontrolled. Like 7am on the first hangover day after only getting 2 hours of sleep, you remember you're just at the beginning of the awful part. And there's no option but to let it run its course.

So you hang on for dear life and cry freely. And you know that each tear wept releases a bit of the cancer from inside you. And the same goes for every word you're brave enough to write.