Pain

(Written 24 May 2019, 3:20 AM IST.)

There's something about pain
That most people
Don't understand.

It is usually one side of a coin
Called life,
The other side of which is
Pleasure.

(In case you're wondering,
The rolling edge of the coin is depression.)

There was a boy I loved
When I was sixteen.
He thought it was crazy
That I thought
That pain was beautiful.
I thought it was crazy
That he was pain, pleasure and beauty,
And that he couldn't see it!

Pain is the loss (real or feared)
Of pleasure once felt, or
Of pleasure imagined.
If you focus hard enough,
It will always make you
Smile.
(Perhaps wistfully.)

It is sitting alone with whiskey,
Missing a love that once was.
It is sitting across from a love now,
Misunderstanding, or misunderstood.
It is a single shared glance
With a love unexplored, a longing, with nowhere to go.

Look,
I am quite frequently on the rolling edge.
I find it hard to settle on a side
Because of how much it hurts
To flip to the other.

And well, I loved, and I love.
But you came, for not quite long enough,
And I don't know about you,
But I wanted more time.
That is pain,
And that makes me smile,
And that is pleasure.

There is something about this
That most people
Don't understand.

But screw 'em.

(In the fourth dimension, if I
Look left, the sixteen
Year-old me still loves the boy,
And if I look right, I see
Not quite anything, really, but
I feel the gaze of some older me
Smiling in pain.)