That which is not pain

The breathtaking heartbreaking humbling brilliance of that which is not pain.

My mother’s pain. My father’s pain. Her mother, her father. His mother, his father. The pain multiplying and spreading as we go backwards in time. The kind of pain that bends you over, takes you down to your knees like you were punched in the gut but worse than that. The kind of pain that hurts so much it’s wordless and that magnifies it because you can’t say it and no one could hear you even if you could.

In my mind I repeat a strange mantra. Something really bad happened. As if after all this time I’m still trying to tell someone, still trying to tell myself, still writing it and saying it over and over because I’m not sure what happened. I don’t know whose burden this is, where it originated. I only know it is a horror beyond words. Betrayal doesn’t cover it. Neither does violation. Neither does grief.

All I know is that it splits me, opens me, spreads me out until I’m trying desperately to hold what’s left of me together, never knowing what I lost, never knowing exactly what was taken from me. Never knowing who I could have been. I’ll never know. That other life is gone. Could not have been.

But I love who I am. I love who I became. Who I became through a crucible of fire. Not once but over and over again. The gods had me on my knees, telling me to look, telling me to see it. And I looked and I saw it, and I couldn’t comprehend what I’d seen. So I spent my whole life trying to write it. Trying to say what happened that started all of this. Trying to tell what happened — the horror of it, the anguish of it, the impossibility of it, the pain.

Whose pain? My mother’s. My father’s. Mine. The things we wish we could burn away with fire. Fight away with our words and our rejection and our violence. Erase with our dismissal, our denial, our incredible powers of not seeing, not knowing. Never claiming what was given to us as our own. And all the while we feed it because we won’t feel it and we won’t face it and we won’t see it and so we can’t know it and therefore we cannot get free.