…nausea…

I feel a general sense of nausea.

All the dam time.

I feel there is a knot of barbed wire in my lower abdomen and it is wrapped around a primal scream.  I am worried the scream will come out and the barbed wire will rip my stomach apart.

I try to take a deep breath and the barbed wire pulses and pulls.

I find comfort in keeping busy and seeing friends.  I find comfort in abandonment to a moment. For all the comfort I can find there is not enough comfort in the world to get me thru a day without this pain.

I imagine I must feel the pain and get to know it, intimately, before I am able to say good-bye to it.

I don’t cry all day or even everyday.  The pain is almost becoming a friend. Constant and reliable.  It doesn’t kick me down…It doesn’t lift me up.  It is just there.  I can understand how someone could become so familiar, comfortable and use to the pain they don’t want to let it go.

I don’t want to become that comfortable with it.  I want the pain to scar.  I want to eventually cover the scars.  I wish to be able to feel them but not feel sensation from them anymore.  I wish to run my hands over my abdomen and feel flesh, muscle, fat: the things that make my physical form.  I wish someone else’s hands run over that same flesh and not want to shrink away…afraid of opening the scars.

Meanwhile: I will deal with the nausea and the pain.  There will be relief one day.  On that day I may not even realize it.  I do hope that I (upon realizing there is no pain) don’t reach for the pain simply for the familiar.  I do hope I am stronger than that.