When old wounds hurt.

Pain is something we experience right from childhood. It starts by falling when we’re learning to walk for the first time. We cry, get up, and try again. As a kid, anytime you get hurt because of a piece of furniture et al, we learn to glare back at it, wide-eyed as if we’ll intimidate it into an apology. As we grow up, the pain gets worse. And it can’t always be soothed with a band-aid.
The pain of loss is probably the most grief inducing thing there is. If we’re lucky, we’ll have someone by our side telling us it’s going to be okay, that we’ll grit our teeth and survive. Fall in love and their pain will feel like it’s causing you pain too. One wince and it feels like a shock wave to your spine.
But the upside is that pain happens to be a great teacher. You fall and you know what you’re doing wrong. A tiny scald and you’ll avoid the hot utensil like a normal person avoids Brussels sprouts. Life never really teaches you to avoid loss—but it DOES teach you how to survive it.
And then there are old wounds. Those faded bruises that we like to show off so proudly because they prove we have a story, that we DID something. The ones that can’t be seen though, are the ones that caused us the most amount of pain. Every time the old wound starts to hurt, we feel fragile, human. The cut’s long gone, but the pain still lingers.
None of us can really imagine life without pain. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We only know how much we were hurting after it’s over.
We feel lucky once the bad part’s over. You think to yourself- “Well, I won’t be doing THAT again”. But some things cannot be won. The pain’s never over because life keeps making more. All you can really do is breathe through it.