When the pain will not lift

It is still there. It was there when you woke, it will be there when you try to sleep, and today you are tired in a way that rest does not touch. Pain that does not end is a different animal from pain that does. It wears down the part of you that makes decisions, until deciding anything at all feels like too much. And the old ritual was never really about relief anyway. It was the ceremony wrapped around a bad hour: the pause, the going outside, ten minutes that belonged to you.

So separate the two things currently sitting on your chest, because they are not one thing. There is the pain, which is real and which you are already carrying, hour by hour, whether or not anybody notices. And there is the panic riding on top of it, running the same sentence: that it will be exactly like this forever. The pain is today. The forever is a forecast, and forecasts made from inside a flare are not information. You have to carry this hour. Nobody has asked you to carry the next ten years tonight.

Then give your body one kindness in the next ten minutes, and make it small enough that you will actually do it. Heat where it hurts. A shower hot enough to change something. Lying flat on the floor with your legs up on the sofa. Slow water. Any position you have not been in all day. This is not a cure and it was never required to be one. It is the ceremony handed back to you with no cigarette attached. The ritual was never the thing you needed. The pause was.

And say the honest thing to God rather than the polite one. Something like this: my body will not cooperate, I am worn down, and I do not understand why this is mine to carry. That is a complete prayer. You are allowed to complain to God about a body He made and has not yet fixed. People have been doing precisely that for thousands of years and He has never required anyone to pretend otherwise. Tonight you are not being asked to be well. You are being asked to get to morning.