Break a Leg

"All pain is permanent as long as it can be seen." 

It’s like breaking a leg. All your friends and close relatives come visit you. If not, they at least call or leave a text message just recording their well wishes. Some really close friends, who’ve also rocked on the same boat, tell you how they had it much worse. Their experience defines their sympathies.

“Oh it was terrible!” they’d say. “Right down the knee cap up to my ankle. Leg split right open. You could even see the marrow! At least yours isn’t so bad.” They think it’s reassuring, but it’s actually not. It just makes me want to cut open my wound and show them I’m stronger than what they see.

Some friends play the pity card. They sit with you, talk to you, watch a movie with you, listen to your complaints and how much it hurts and how nothing is helping. They try to feel empathetic, but they’re not even close. They can’t feel it. Others try to cheer you up with mundane things like juice or candy or your favourite food. They just don’t know that when in pain, even sugar tastes bitter. It’s just how it is.

It’s not their fault to be honest. They’re just doing their job. Trying to help during the healing process. Trying to be there at the worst times. Just to create memories. Or maybe to reassure themselves that when it’s their turn, you’ll be there for them. I’ll be there for them.

What they don’t understand, is that at the time of healing, nothing feels good. It’s like chemo therapy. You lose your hair, your skin is pale, and the doctors are saying you’re getting better. But you don’t see it. You don’t feel it. It’s not there. The lasers are killing you and the cancer, simultaneously. You both are the disease, and you both are the cure.

What really agitates me is when it hurts, you can’t see it. They can’t see it. So when you complain and cry and show them the area where it hurts, they can’t see it. They’ll tell you it’ll get better, but they’re deluding you in the process of deluding themselves.

But the bizarre thing is, when the pain is unbearable, it stops. Everything stops. Your screams just become wave energies that you produce from your throat, tears just droplets of water cleaning your eyes, and your leg, just a hollow piece of bone, waiting to be mended.

When the pain is less, I sit near my window. Watching the kids play together, or the birds chirping away near the maple tree. It’s calming but not enough to make me forget what I’m unable to do. It’s not long before I push away and lie back in my bed and put my earphones on, muting the world as the melodies sooth my ear.

As time passes by, the friends start coming occasionally; giving more gaps between their visits and shortening their stay. It’s only fair. Nobody has the time that I have. So I welcome them just as hospitably as I did the first time. Their expectations grow from visit to visit.

“Oh it’s been a few weeks now, the leg is about to heal!”

“Well look at that, just a couple of weeks, the cast will be off and you’ll be walking along.”

I just smile and nod. Clearly they’re more optimistic than I’ll ever be. A few weeks to them are years to me. My time zone is different from theirs. Seconds can last as long as months and days can feel as short as minutes. Night bright as day and days darker than nights. That’s what pain does to you.

Eventually they stop coming. I get texts from them asking me how I am. How much longer till the cast is off. I say a few more days. 

I await the day my leg is free again. Scarred, but free. I walk. It’s magic.

I am back among the regular the people. Laughing, talking. My friends forget the wound and time heals the cuts. But I remember it fondly. The pain, my impeding friend.

That’s how a heartbreak feels. Exactly like that. 

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