The experience of pain transmuted across languages

Acı Çekiyorum

I am pulling pain. That’s what you say when you are hurting, in Turkish. You’re not just in pain, you’re pulling it. Into you. Onto you. Towards you. It’s active and it’s constant and it’s a literal mode of being that you are forced to inhabit. Inexplicably so. Like you have to pull or you’ll be off balance. You have no choice in the matter. You’re simply in it until you’re not. Until time and space have decided to loosen that strain, slacken the rope, relax their grasp. Time, the ultimate healer, tells you that pulling is no longer necessary. You can simply be. And so you slowly release your grip. You stop pulling, and the cloud of hurt once shrouding your faculties, your logic, at once dissipates. Becomes an impossibility to you. To your now clear mind.

In a vicious, but unbelievably banal, circle, you find yourself back at square one. Settled, calm, and somehow hopeful for the hurt to come. All the pain you’re yet to pull, because there’s no possibility without the possibility of pain. And if pain lives in love and happiness, then would we not rather have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? And if pain carries the residues of something precious which we were once in possession of, then even in our deepest caverns, shouldn’t we be grateful to the heights we must have climbed in order to fall this low? For a memory past is still a memory had. A single moment another may spend a lifetime yearning for. I’d rather bleed in remembrance of that moment past, than cry in desperation for nothing either loved or lost.