Life is pain. That’s what they say. Pain— physical, emotional, mental— it touches everyone. So mine is not unique, I would say. Pain is life. Life is pain.
But endless pain— that is a different animal. It never stops. It slinks beside you, sleeps in your bones, a feral thing slithering through your soul, feeding on your light.
It steals. Dreams. Desires. Hope. You begin to speak of the Time Before Pain like a lost country— a utopia you once called home.
Now the present is war. Every day a siege, every hour a whisper of resistance: beat it conquer it survive it.
This pain lives off you. It eats your basics, hollows your core. You stop wanting love. You stop wanting wealth. You want one thing only: the cessation of pain.
And the future? A fog, a flicker— maybe there, a life beyond this. But now— now, pain fills you, poisoning your soul against the fragile thread of hope.
It fills you with anger, with emptiness, with a raw and aching need— the need for someone to see you.
To see beyond the red, raging storm, past the mask, into the trembling self still curled in the heart of it all— and simply see you.