Hurting

(in response to We Remember Your Childhood Well, by Carol Ann Duffy)

So many different ways to hurt, causing hurt, taking it.

Pain. Hurt. No, hurt doesn't have anything to do with pain. Not today, here, the way I'm thinking about it...

What you thought was your best friend didn't make it in your class in secondary school. "Why is it so important? You'll still see her, won't you?" But it is important. Because she was my shield, she made things better. Now I'm exposed. "Don't be so silly." Which means friendships don't matter. Exposed is how I'm supposed to feel.

"Those boys over there, they thought I was a boy. They made fun of me."

"I told you you should do something with your hair. Honestly, let's try to give it a brush. We won't cut it short anymore."

...So it is my own fault. For not looking feminine enough. My fault for looking wrong.

"What will people think?" That's another good one. Never mind how much you're hurting. Let's pretend everything is fine. Dishonesty is the best policy. Being genuine does not pay off.

And that time we had to scoop Father off the pavement outside the house. That was bad enough. But the real lesson there was that my father was an embarrassment. Ah! Those lessons. Those throw away comments coming together to make up the very fabric of myself, my heavy burden. My memories, the way I remember them, because I was there. My eyes saw. Not yours. Me, as a person different from you, affected in different ways. Him throwing you across the room. Your body smashing against that yellow and white 70s lamp. "I'm ok," you said. I'm ok, she said. It's ok to be beaten, slapped and kicked for being annoying. Men are allowed to hurt women. It's ok to hurt. It's not ok to run away.

My god. This, THIS was the lesson. This is what I was taught. I was made to feel it was my fault. But it really wasn't.

HURTING is what I feel each day. You were taken and your departure left me deeply hurting.

This thought is coupled with the words of a song: "You are the wind beneath my wings."

They echo through each day of loneliness, through each windless day.

I'm grounded now, with no one to guide me to the runway, from the end of which I could fly, if wind assisted.

Is the hurting continuous? Has it no end?

What if,perhaps, another, although not comparable to you, is compassionate enough to recognise my plight, offers to raise me up, to help me fly again?

It's not as if my life now lacks meaning but rather that it has a different, less significant meaning,

a selfishness, without its fondly remembered sharing element!

I would like to discuss the hurting that recalling certain memories produces, thinking of acts imposed and perhaps acts you imposed, the way they can rip across your mind ricocheting though different members of your body and organs.

This memory attacks the liver, this one the causes a weird burning tickle in the left hand side of my right palm, this one causes my eyelids to swell and hood my eyes in the absence of tears.

Funny how the cause of pain can be so different from the release of pain.

An outburst of tears­ it doesn't have to be related to the pain needing to be expressed, it could come out while watching a telly novella or hearing about someone else's misfortune or letting go of something dear.

An angry outburst can be tempting but that is just a dam, the fortress restraining the great flood.

The overwhelming flood needed to wash down, wash away and evaporate all the poisons held tight to those dam walls.

The overwhelming flood will subside, it's height will level down, it's current will calm, living things like fish and crabs and frogs and insects will feel safe again to live within and without the waters surface.

Where is that telly novella I can watch, the one corny enough, detached enough from my experiences to fool those tears into appearing, maybe I can talk more about killing buses in China, Ethiopian pirates, religious witch priests in Nigeria, female genital mutilation.

A memory associated with pain; my father was taking me on the cross-bar of his bicycle from home to somewhere where he had to be. Looking back my impression is that he was in a hurry, but my mother had told him to take me with him. When he went to throw his leg over the saddle, one of my ankles caught in the spokes of the front wheel. The pain was bad but my father's anger was worse.

This brings me round to memories of my father; I don't remember a loving compassionate relationship. Being the youngest of three brothers, I was the one who was “suffered along”. My older brothers were more into sea-scouting and football as my father was. He was a sea-scout master and played football.

Hurting is too painful to remember... So I will just sit and look at the weather

Raining dogs and cats that’s what the English say

Rain falls from the sky... a tear trickles from the eye

It wasn’t the onions that made me cry

As I screamed out my pain up into the sky

Hurting can be disguised in laughter making the best of a bad deal

Only at night time does the mask reveal the secret hurting pain we feel

Triggered by a line from a song

A slow bluesy saxophone lingering in the air

Takes you back to where you don’t want to go

Your first mistake was to say hello... but that was another time and place

Another lifetime of the ancient past

Looking now into the morning mirror

Same old face

So many different kinds of hurt, of hurting. I don’t want to dwell on my experiences of feeling hurt at the hands and eyes and voices of others. I don’t want to dip into the well of hurting I have pooled over the years by my own actions towards others. I can see my face reflected back blackly as I peer over the rim, and I want to pull across the shutter lid and land it neatly with a thud. Then there is the hurting I do and have done to myself. The release of self harm, the masochistic entanglement and persisting in relationships that are abusive, the placing of myself in situations that scream danger to others but soothe me with the familiarity of a well-worn reel played over and over, the outcome certain, but still the thrill of the ride, the rise and fall of hope and fear. But now I experience some hurting in a different, liberating, way. A way I can relish without feeling I am abusing myself. A hurting that is robust, that values the strength of the scar, the healing, over the bruise and rip of flesh, of muscle. I have found a love for the slog of aerial, the trapeze, the rope, the silks, the hoop. Lured by its elegance and promise of weightless flight, I find the real satisfaction is in the graft in getting there. The moves may look effortless in execution but they are painful not only in the learning but in the routine carrying out of them too. The footlocks that pinch to the point of unbearability, the arm muscles straining with tension beyond taut, the scream of a knee hocking over the bar, bearing the full weight of me. There is such pleasure here in the discovery of my own strength, in the building of resilience. Yes it’s also a gain when the hurting eases enough to not grimace and wince and pull away; but I need its presence. It reminds me of what I am doing, that I am a body, that I am contorting myself, elevating and dangling myself, that I need strength to pull and hold myself, that if I am not able, I will plummet to the ground, feet of clay, not a winged being after all.