I woke up incredibly sore today. Not your ordinary aches and pains that one in middle age experiences from time to time, but more of an all-encompassing soreness. Ribs tender to the touch, and shoulder blades that feel as though they are bruised despite never being battered. It's that kind of pain that makes you suddenly aware of your body in a way you don't often think about. This soreness has carried throughout the day. Every movement a reminder.
The funny thing about pain is once you feel it you grow accustomed to it. It's not that you like it per se, but, it's nice to feel things sometimes, even if that thing is unpleasant. Just to break through the boredom, I suppose. Shake things up a bit.
Then there's the other kind of pain... there's just something about the physical manifestation that catcalls to the emotional kind, asking if it would like a piggyback ride to join in on the fun.
Today I thought a lot about a lot of different people. A lot of different eras of my life. A lot of scenarios that took place as though they were a series of dreams, or reruns of tv shows that I'd watched years and years ago that I still have foggy recollections of. There was a common theme that stood out to me. Yes, pain is clearly the obvious answer, but it is so much more than that. The theme was actually cruelty.
I sat here today not in any new routine than normal aside from these aches and sorenesses that showed up out of the blue (you would think I'd been lifting weights the day previous), and I had a slideshow in my head of all of the people who have been cruel to me. All of the times that I let someone in. The few who I have been vulnerable with and cared about. And how every single one of them had been cruel. People who really had no business behaving that way, but they did just the same. And the hardest part about circulating these memories around in my noggin was knowing that I never really deserved it. And it made me want to never see or speak to anyone ever again.
