Two years ago, a warm weekday evening at the ice cream shop
the three of us used to go as teenage...
Two years ago, a warm weekday evening at the ice cream shop
the three of us used to go as teenage girls. We sat underneath the cold blaze
of fluorescent lights, the three of us again, licking at our cones, and I had
never seen pain so etched on someone’s face before. My friend talked of a
second miscarriage. She spoke of so much blood, of labor pains, contractions, of
birthing something spongy and incomplete into the toilet. Her pain seemed more
whole than anything I had ever seen or felt. I ate my ice cream and remembered
the rumors that they made the softserve there with seaweed and sawdust to keep
the calories low, and I listened as she talked and watched as she tried not to
cry and then cried.
Do you remember when you were initiated into pain? Not the dumb
hot pain of a stubbed toe or a bit lip. Not the annihilating pain of a broken
tibia or the cold static of a migraine. But the pain of loss. The pain of
wanting something you may not ever get. The pain that gives a new and first-time look at yourself in
ways you hadn’t seen before, when regret and sorrow cleave space for light to reach
places no light had reached before. I came late to pain, or it came late to me.
But when it arrived last winter, I learned how loss leads to lost. And in the midst of the hurt and ache and the
loosening grip on what was real, I felt myself, for the first time, human. And
it made me wonder: what had I been before?
“What about pain?” I heard someone ask a teacher the other
night. “Remember that it unites us as people,” the teacher said, and there’s
heart-softening solace there. “Remember that it’s something all of us share,” the teacher said. “Pain
and love. Pain and love.” How did it take me so long to
know? That they are paired, plaited, that you cannot have one without the other.
