Pain

I’ve had a nomadic pain ever since I arrived in Grinnell for the summer. It started in my jaw, an indistinct ache most of the time, but it flared whenever I put my mouth in the wrong position chewing. Then it settled on the bottom gutter between my gums and lips. It spread out as a few big spots of acne, straining against the skin. And then it became a raging irritation across my lips. After that it cycled between old favorites: jaw again, acne again, lips again, and just when I thought the pain had run out of ideas and was content to bounce across my face in familiar constructions, I dashed my knee on hard playground plastic while playing tag with students. I thought I could walk it off at first, but then my wandering pain settled into its new home in my bone and kept me limping for days. Then, a few nights ago, I woke up around one a.m. already scratching through my eczema and leaving bloody streaks across my sheets. I applied on ointment and put a sock around my hand to keep from touching it. It didn’t work, scratching just felt too damn nice, and I knew I’d never sleep with this temptation hanging over me. So I scratched, a little relieved when the joy turned to pain and I could get to work solving the problem instead of making it worse. Whatever demon keeps me hurting, he’s getting cleverer and crueler, now that he’s making me hurt myself. When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t even close my hand into a fist.

I’m sure you think that I’m just creating this character for the sake of hyperbole and comic relief. And I think that too, for the most part. Still, it’s been eerie how none of my ailments this summer have gapped or overlapped: there’s always exactly one at a time. It got downright eerie, in fact, when I got up to walk to the bathroom to wash the blood off my hand at the start of my itching episode and found that my right knee walked without complaint for the first time in a full week.

I usually think that I don’t have a very high pain tolerance, but that’s not really true. I broke an arm climbing up a slide in first grade, a toe when my mom startled me on the stairs by suddenly turning on the vacuum in seventh grade, both wrists in an epic bike accident in ninth grade and another wrist in a much less epic running accident my senior year. For most of them I cried a little, but the pain was never really overwhelming. And usually the thrill of getting a cast put on a few hours later outweighed the minutes of sharp pain right after the accident. Anyway, I’ve run track and cross country for nine years (going on a full decade this fall), and even though the only real skill in that sport is enduring a steady layer of pain through a race, I’ve done decently well. So it’s not that I don’t have a high tolerance for pain, it’s just that I don’t like it very much. 

Or, more specifically, I don’t like lasting pain. The moment the bone breaks, even the twenty minutes and change it takes to run a 10-K, all of those are self-contained enough to endure. It’s the lingering kind that I can’t stand. The summer I broke my wrists my family went to Rome, and I couldn’t stand how the sweat pooled on the cloth lining my cast, feeling the itch and smelling the stink of it and knowing that there was nothing I could do to stop. That’s maybe the worst my body has ever felt, even though nothing actually hurt.

I’m wary of generalizing about the whole human population, many of whom have suffered worse than I ever have, but I’m inclined to think that the long and humiliating pain is always worse than the short and dramatic. There was even something kind of fun in that bike accident in ninth grade, in peeling myself up and examining my bleeding arms as my vision changed color in growing swirls. Maybe it’s like that in all pain, actually: what’s worst is the small things that persist. There’s a similar fun in stumbling into daylight after watching a horrifying or depressing movie, knowing that you were destroyed in the theater, but now it’s over and somehow life persists. But, about two weeks after I broke both wrists, my cousin Stephen died at eight years old. It wasn’t his absence that got to me, so much, just that I knew he was never coming back. That there’d always be a cavity in our family gatherings, an aching spot that never fills. That’s what I was mourning the day I heard the news: all the years he wouldn’t get, the years that we’ll keep counting for as long as we live.

I didn’t mean to make this about Stephen. I don’t know where the the last half of the paragraph above came from; I just wandered towards that point and the words wrote themselves. Maybe it’s inevitable, that he’d come up in my post on pain. But the problem with doing these things unplanned is I can’t make the parallels lead each other to the points I want. Because there’s a difference between Stephen’s absence and an enduring pain like a splinter, besides the obvious that Stephen’s absence is so much worse. Evolutionary explanations aside, the best you can say about pain is that, odds are, it will get better in time. Stephen’s death isn’t like that. I don’t want it to get better, because if it does, then I’ll lose the source of that absence too: the memories of joy that make him up in my mind.