I wear my noose like a necklace, a heavy, bejeweled chain pulling my neck and body ever downwards. How ironic this is, though, for whilst I am perpetually reaching towards the heavens—when will I be inducted into the community of seraphs I have so longed to be an appanage to?—my mind’s penetralia sink further into the sanguine pool of Hades, that which he bathes in and lets himself be bathed in. Though likely the deduction of one at the apotheosis of insanity, the notion, incessantly making itself known, that I am not all different from a Greek god who never once was, is impossible to dispel. Pain can only do his work if his client is willing, and so, just as Hades washes his already-sanguine limbs with the potions of Pain, I let myself fall, deeper and deeper, into a state impossible to consummate.

Hello! This is my first post to Prose. I wrote this piece last year (when I was in 8th grade); since then, I have made no emendations to it. I hope you like it!

The large, heavy book sitting beside me is Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Four hundred and seventy thousand entries grace my desk. Out of this, I pluck one, the page quivering with emotion analogous to my selection: pain. The state of suffering, of agony; the blood trickling down the edge of a wooden hammer; the stain of tears on my bedside; an asset and an incommodity—an experience common to humanity, yet not shared.

Up until the age of eleven, I was a rather ebullient, jovial child, my existence pleasant and petty, though not of an egoistic nature. I had not an idea, truly, what pain was; neither of happiness, as my ignorance had provided a barrier to my knowledge of what I was experiencing. I had not an idea that the familial ecstasy that was so ordinary would be spoilt, and that in a matter of months I would be alone.

Thus came my first encounter with pain; he was not kind. Of course, my family thought me to be reacting disproportionately, that I had perhaps exacerbated my previous anxieties. I knew not what I was feeling, except for that it was agonizing. Nevertheless, my childhood breaking off at such a startling point was, perhaps, a blessing in disguise. Though my happiness was retracted, so was my ignorance towards it; though I had not elation or joy, I had a certain knowledge I had not possessed beforehand. I was not more intelligent, however; this knowledge tortured and engulfed me, so that my focus was directly on trying assiduously to rid myself of his influences. Still, I could not stop him. He ravaged the penetralia of my mind, a starving creature never satiated. Each time I proffered what he desired, it was not enough; he would not be satisfied.

I sought out what was beyond me, to search for what was within me—an erroneous mission from the start. I was not yet cognizant of the fact that oneself is the only barrier from pain’s rapacity and deleterious deeds, and yet, this is not a barrier enough to preclude him from seeping into the fallacious niches of human nature, the impetus for the inciting of his forces. Inside oneself, the empty void that must be filled by being and the self is instead filled by his seeping vitriol. In some cases, this may be exacerbated by the circumstances of loss—and now, the lucidity of this assertion is engendered; I see all around me others that have lost: their careers, remuneration, relatives, friends, and sources of education. Yet, perhaps, their greatest loss is themselves, as they succumb to the cacophonies of silence—our eyes were created and oriented so that we cannot look inwards at ourselves; thus, the unambiguity and cogency one can purport to possess not being directed towards what first must be addressed. The media, then, is a lure, a trap in which the bait need just to employ their senses, for pain to catch hold and proliferate, the lure being that much of the time, the media exemplifies the obtainment of which the opposite is what must desirably be attained: the condensation of emotion and conflict into a form only understandable to the most frivolous.

Thus, pain is inescapably imperative to life, just as is imperfection and death; yet, many of us seek, as our unbeknownst purposes, to ameliorate this, without the knowledge that what first must be expiated and filled is themselves. In spite of this, our concerns are too widespread. We are afraid of the unknown, of what comes beyond our lives and sits beyond our consciousness, leading us to engage in the fruitless pursuit of the former. Most of us are merely concerned with the frivolities of life, our fictitious purposes only a headstone we strive to obtain after we fulfill the years of our lives. We heed not the truth, nor the reality; our experience of pain is solely physical, for we do not seek to find the power within us. Rather, we seek in vain for effervescence around us, already a river run dry. Empathy is a tone too sharp for the pained and too flat for the dissipated, and yet, we brim our souls with sophistries that vindicate a tone purportedly precise. Thus, pain is further fomented and his forces instigated, as he sucks both the falsities and the self to the dry marrow before again suffusing the self with falsities, as though supplying a dry mouth with salted water. Often, I cannot bear to watch these happenings that occur about me, the facetious life that is familiar to me, and that I cannot understand, even though I contribute to its continuation. The monotony of the morning carries to midday, and mutates to the moroseness of midnight. Each day blends together, an amalgamation of such monotony with the frivolity each member of the household acts upon. I look at my mother the way I have looked at her yesterday, with the same carelessness she exudes when looking at me. Likewise, though I am aware of this, we act with the frivolity we exerted yesterday. And yet, was it not yesterday that I sat at this same laptop, watching men commit an unforgivable atrocity to another man?

This is what pain has taught me, the greatest and most horrible teacher. He has taught me about myself, such a being he knows that I will never touch, so long I am alive. I wondered for many years on why it was I that pain chose, out of so many—until I learned that I was lucky. He gave me all that I know today.