Anatomy of Hurt

It starts in the womb. An archive of pain, these feelings in the gut and flashbacks of memories I suppress. They arrive uninvited, in silence, in chaos. I inherit these whispers in tandem with echoes. An ache blooms. It does not settle in the womb, I cannot place it in the heart, sometimes it’s a phantom in my ears, a sight at the corner of my eyes, a fleeting afterglow grazing on my skin…the hurt, do I call it a wound? A psycho-somatic, intangible displacement.

I am becoming its asylum, a refuge.

My mind, a dimly lit library corridor, brushing the past against the present. Am I here, or am I anchored in the past? Have I begun to let go, or are these the remnants I choose to carry forth? I want to be still, and perhaps I am. Am I simply longing, or is the hurt changing the architecture of my anatomy? A displaced condition, some misplaced trust.

I think of the places I walked, the moments when a malevolent syndrome, the anatomy of my devastation, held me. Stood on the fence and watched the quiet bruising of boundaries. And I laughed, but retracted too soon. Yelled when I needed to be held. Smiled for peace when I wanted to scream for an end. Casual abandonment, not a dramatic betrayal but a layered assault on love. The pattern - identical, repetitive, unforgiving. How many times did I name endurance, love?

Perhaps, the hurt does not ask to be named…the phantom in my womb, it travels.

The ache, rhythmic, a musing, a spectre of our unbecoming. Who were you before I named you? Who was I before a number replaced my name? After all these years, I still confused disregard for love.

There is no neat ending, no lessons learned. Only the becoming and unbecoming of this anatomy of hurt. The body listens, the mind archives, the heart hopes against hope, but I no longer yearn for a tomorrow. The hurt, no longer an enemy, just the answer.