A Short Treatise on Pain, Written After the Fact

Pain does not arrive as an event.
It insinuates.
It learns the architecture of a person
and rearranges the rooms
without ceremony.

At first, it speaks softly
a correction, a lesson,
a minor undoing.
One believes it temporary,
as one believes winter courteous.

But pain is not an affliction;
it is a craftsman.
It works slowly, with devotion,
pressing its thumb into the wet clay of being
until the original shape
can no longer be recalled.

I have seen what it removes.
Tenderness thins.
Wonder evacuates.
The future loses its grammar
and begins to stutter.

Cruelty is pain’s chosen method.
Not the loud kind
no spectacle, no fire
but the intimate cruelty
of repetition,
of returning daily
to the same vulnerable place
until resistance forgets its own name.

Under its tutelage,
the heart grows educated.
It learns suspicion.
It learns restraint.
It learns how to survive
by becoming less itself.

There was once a self here
that reached without calculation,
that trusted weightless things
light, voices, the nearness of others.
Pain corrected that error thoroughly.

Now what remains is altered matter:
a quieter posture,
a gaze trained downward,
a soul that has traded innocence
for accuracy.

If transformation is sacred,
then pain is a brutal priest.
It baptizes with endurance,
confirms with loss,
and leaves the initiate changed
not purified,
but unmistakably reshaped.

And should anyone ask
when this happened,
I would not know how to answer.
Pain never marks a date.
It simply stays long enough
that the person who suffered
is no longer the one
who remembers arriving whole.