On The Basis Of Pain

I hold in my heart this primordial fear that I will always be unfulfilled. This bleak, gray matter will consume me for all time and I’ll never feel anything else. I fear I will be doomed to nothingness and regret. The walls will disappear and the space surrounding me will contort until I can’t see any semblance of shape or pattern, and I’ll be left floating in a colorless void. I feel like I’ve brought this onto myself for wanting more than what the world has given me. This is my pain.

I carry specific ideas of pain like they are masks; chosen identities I’ve collected throughout my life, specifically my 20’s. I appoint many images and quotes to my pain. I believe I am an open vessel for the words of all the artists I idolize, yet I cannot add to their brilliance in any way, so I regurgitate their greatness like vomit. Just the other day, I was having a pretty severe panic attack after work. Mouth agape, drool spilling on my college sweatshirt, eyes bloodshot and dry from the stale tears of hours before the pain combusted into torment, I was overwrought with grief. My mother had me lay on my bedroom floor with a blanket, swaddling me as she directed me to stare at the corners of my eyes, back and forth for a few seconds each time to slow down the thoughts. I heard her counting the seconds out loud. I heard the sound of my vent inches from my head. I saw the warm glow of my standing lamp and the small dust particles gathered by my rug. My senses were acutely aware of the space around me, the person by my feet. But for whatever reason, like my mind was cast in an unbreakable trance, I could only think of one thing:

“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

I don’t know why it spoke to me in that moment. But it was the only thing that could bring me down from that insatiable pain. I kept repeating it, and afterwards I wondered if my pain felt like Cthulhu. Could I have discovered a new face belonging to this torment? It made more sense as I thought about it. An eldritch abomination, alien to Terranian geometry and scale. It’s very being the essence of complete confusion and chaos. And in it’s decaying Cyclopean city of R’lyeh, it awaits it’s resurgence into cosmic entropy, silently dreaming. My pain feels that way, I think. It is terribly confusing and ugly. When it’s alive it is devastating and shows no mercy. It wants me dead. But when the grief eventually passes, the pain never feels truly gone. It’s like it’s sleeping, awaiting whatever moment may come for it to wreak havoc once again. The pain comes in waves. I never know when it will come or what will spark it’s emergence, but when it does, it’s like I’ve met with something terribly familiar, and there’s nothing I can do. That is the basis of pain.