Pain is not just a feeling. It’s a way of thinking. It’s the involuntary abdication of any belief in a world beyond the body. Your perceptive field shrinks, recoiling from the room until it encompasses only that locality of yourself in which the warning system blares. It seems like the worst survival response possible. You are biologically compelled to break from your cage, but you can’t think of an escape plan, can’t reason through the panic of sensation, can’t think of anything except that there are nerve endings in you, and they are firing.
One of the small mercies in the world is that most people will never experience true harm, but even those who do can never feel it all at once. When you cannot absorb pain at the time, it flows outwards, pooling over your days, staining them with experience. Pain, and all the behaviours it drags behind it, become your personality. You are the stranger screaming at your son, positioning your bed towards the door, on seven different tablets. You breathe in and never exhale.
The obvious respite is in detaching from the body. Any torturer is, of course, one step ahead of your plan. The point of the torture is to make it so that you are tethered to your matter, locked in a burning building. It is perpetual immolation. Most people walk around thinking of their body as whole and inviolable. It’s through a certain kind of deconstruction that you are shown that you are meat. And meat can be cut, meat can be tenderised. No one denies the existence of butchers, but for some reason, few of us think we can be butchered.
There is meant to be a spirit, some ineffable transcendental emancipator that wrenches you free from the flesh. But seeing your own heartbeat pulse in your veins makes you realise how close even a young, able-bodied person is to death. Any ignorance of that is a healthy ignorance. It is not possible to operate knowing how close to the edge you walk.
Escape from the body, too, becomes its own death. If you are not present, you are nowhere. If you’re anywhere, you do not exist. I survive in dreams of a future that will never arrive.
