(pain)

XIII.

         My migraines begin with no beginning. When a migraine starts, when it finds me; well there is no place, no point when it's found me for sure. Like the horizon in a gradient, like the birth of gray from the death of black and white. Because when I suddenly get a migraine, I suddenly feel pain the way it's always been there. In fact, there is only one migraine, I've never had more than one migraine, and it is always there, but not always beginning. Like a person you know: all of the person you know, your whole experience of that person, things about that person, is all of who you know you know, and all of that's inside you, always is. It somehow never leaves you, never stays in you, and you forget and you experience again and again; as soon as you see the person again, you know them again. And then life goes on and they are not physically present, and you forget until you remember. My migraine begins in a realm like halfway-asleep, a realm that exists in both asleep and awake, but not between. A No Place when anything could be, where nothing begins and nothing's eternal, and everything confusing can be seen confusing in all clarity, and things that start are not starting when they start. I don't know when my migraine finds me. Perhaps it's my head in orbit to the mass of potential that everything physical and experiential passes into: the chest of the body. And perhaps my head eternally undergoes phases, and in certain phases my head can be seen from the migraine that lives in the chest, and that's where it finds me.

         Pain is a funny thing because there are several ways it can hurt and several ways it can heal and several ways it can be happening and not hurt. It can afflict, it can teach, it can put you to sleep; it can wake you, ruin you, strengthen you, and drive you to a place when nothing makes sense and yet you experience the all-nonsense with all of your senses, and it's so clearly neither-either that suddenly you understand with an understanding that feels like it never began.

         There is physical pain, emotional pain, lonely pain; the pain of inseparability, the pain of winter, the pain of spring, the pain of transience and the pain of For Good. There is a pain for difficulty and a pain for simplicity. Pain can be tiny and inconsiderable, nagging and subconscious, undiscovered. It can be tremendous and sensational, it can carry you away to a sadness you don't want to be parted from, it can raise flags of blood and purpose that inspire waxing wind into your sails. It can steal your sails and leave you drifting to no purpose, it can cycle like fear and paranoia until you feel so alive from suffering that being close to death could not make you feel more alive. Pain can be the decay that fertilizes the soil, that nurtures things that grow. Pain can parent love, and hate, and indifference. It can be felt in every part of the body, of the chest, of the mind and heart, it can be felt it in places that don't exist and it can start and never start, kindle and douse fires. Pain can die while it's living, it can die and still be pain, hammering and aching and breathing in your head. Because pain is a funny thing; pain is both a thing separate from you and your experience of it. Pain knows the death of death as well as the death of life, and if it's seems closer to death it's because you are far from both death and life, which are always close together. Which are always found in each other, which are always like friends we know and we touch and we friend and we leave and we live. There is a No Point when pain becomes the death to your life, and the same No Point is where pain becomes the life to your death. Pain calls me back to my body, like a force that I can trust it brings my head to my chest, and there is water and air, and I can see the water and I can feel the air.

         Sometimes the pain is like a bowl of water; this is how the pain is separate from me. Sometimes when it's there the bowl seems really full, and if I am sitting and holding the very full bowl it means that I can't stand up without spilling it; this is how the pain is my experience of the pain that is separate from me. Sometimes the pain of not being able to stand up without spilling is water, more water put in the bowl such that a single breath would make it spill; this is a point where somehow the pain of the experience becomes the experience of pain. And it's a point where pain that is separate from me becomes a part of me, which is the start of the death of pain while it continues to live and be.

         Suddenly, I don't need the pain of pain, and it needs to be embraced. I can shove it away, bury it but the pain continues to be, and the pain of the pain continues to be. It can't be fought and killed---anyone with headaches must know that fighting headache pain makes it worse, and even medicine doesn't kill it. That if a headache dies after taking medicine, it was because of healing and not fighting, because a thing can be healed to its death. And pain of pain is very similar to the pain; it can be healed to its death, and then the pain still lives, but the feeling of pain has changed. The way all deaths are changes and not losses and not gains and not neither and not change. So I embrace it and I change, and the pain of pain is the part of me that changes, and the pain stays the same but I am living; for my head and my chest the pain becomes life, becomes a part of it, becomes a part of me like a bone in my body. Another sensation to live, another feeling to wake me up, to be awake so I am feeling the No Point that is always there that we don't always feel. The Point that our heads can't touch without our chest, that words don't touch, that's so essential it can't be described, is too complex, too simple to understand without knowing by feeling and can only be lived: the horizon between life and death, the line that makes our heads feel we are alive, and our chests know it.