332 words on pain

How hideous and maybe wonderful it is that cramps are not unique.

Particular people who moan and groan and move their hands towards their pelvic bone while walking down quiet streets are to be generally avoided. Unless they were me on Monday night, fresh off a Dublin bus and holding a torn paper shopping bag, rent open by a man’s boot in the Tesco self-service jungle area on Parnell Street, like a heavy sleeping toddler. I needed a leather belt between my teeth, soldier on the Crimean battlefields style. I needed help with my bags. Muttering ‘arsehole’ at the DGAF species you find doing the shop on Monday evening didn’t help at all.

I had sledgehammer cramps that night. I went to bed crying, my tummy scalding with the cosy weight of a hot water bottle. How much of this was pain pain and other pain. When you’re in this mood other moods invite themselves in and make pointed remarks.

I had the cramps the next day, and the day after that, and will no doubt fall prey to twinges today. I walked. I met friends. I scrolled my phone. I sat in a class on public policy and listened to descriptions of happiness indexes and controlled experiments. All the while a demon pulled at my various parts like a person behind the curtains of a malevolent opera making set changes happen. It was overlapping roiling and I, the lead, had to keep on singing when I could, in spite of everything being a little too much. 

On Tuesday night I lay in bed and thought about how hideous and maybe wonderful it is that these types of pains are not unique. That throughout history we have sympathy simpatico sisters who also felt like their bodies were scraped and kicked from the inside by a ghost of their own making. That a woman you admire across continents and decades probably silently screamed ‘fuck’ in the same way you have. That your Female Enemy has probably also been pulled down into a riptide of pain.