It Reminded Me of the Pain I'd Never Not Known*

From my old sketch book, written 11/22/2007, fall junior year.

"It is a demoralizing moment when you learn that you have a self; a pained private self, that only you can know. Each of us posses this self, hides it away behind laughter and shared experience.

It is this secret self which harms us, holds us, which must be beaten back every morning with the desire to smile, to hope, to live. It is this self which holds on to and locks inside it every unkind word - silently rapping against the light in your soul with a low mournful cry "I hurt. I hurt.", a call that must be suppressed if we are to love, to feel, to survive at all. A call that eats away at your stability like termites to a house until not a gale force, but a gust (a word, a flower, a memory) leads you to crumble and splinter. In ruin, in weakness, in vulnerability - it is here you have no structure at all.

and you find yourself in the rubble. Now your whole self "I hurt. I hurt"

and you vow to build it stronger "I hurt. I hurt"

and you banish away the pained secret self, to a place where you can't hear it, but it kills you - wordlessly."

{* title allusion: Nicole Krauss, The History of Love: A novel}