A Little Blue Book of Pain

Maybe I enjoy the suffering too much to let it go.

“There's a sorrow and pain in everyone's life, but every now and then there's a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

I get so tired of the familiar ways in which I hurt.

Camus once wrote, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Instead, it’s more like one must imagine Camus deranged. Most people with nice jobs, comfortable houses, and a beautiful family aren’t even happy. They drink their morning coffee with a perverse delight in their own suffering. 

Sometimes it even seems like suffering is the goal. They go on vacations to blue beaches and complain about their Mai Tai order taking too long, or get in an argument with the hotel concierge desk for putting them up in the wrong room. They fabricate reasons why they are no longer in love with their wives so they can give themselves permission to cheat.

As a general rule, people don’t embrace the absurdity of life. They rail against it. They don’t deal well with surprises or a big loss. They don’t even like to win. They just find new ways to hate each beautiful thing.

If you’re not careful you can enmesh yourself a black, broiling ball of suffering no matter how well off you are or how much you’ve accomplished.

A dream can become a monstrous entity that sticks its snout into all your little joys and taints them with its poisonous breath. Every paradise turns into a hell if it’s just always out of reach.  

For ten years I’ve been chasing my vision of heaven. Sometimes I even walk into it for a moment, like I just discovered a secret hallway in a house that I’ve been living in for years. A place where colors are brighter. The air is cooler. When I breathe it’s like my lungs have become new again. Each particle, each movement, feels significant. I think to myself, this is what it means to feel alive. 

This is what it’s like to be happy. It’s real. Happiness is real. Such a thought feels forbidden. Tenuous. Like it can only exist in moonlight, in windswept grasses and nestled in abandoned burrows. Like if I turn on the bright overhead lights it’ll scatter away like a rat. 

Happiness is real.

The soft skin of the world rises up to greet me. Even my coffee tastes better. I can taste the ridges of the mountains and the valleys of the earth. I think that if I can live like this for the rest of my life, then I won’t have to put so much effort into being afraid. I can stop hiding myself from my own eyes.

Camus also wrote once, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” But that’s not really a choice at all when you feel like you’re standing on the rim of infinite, sunlit possibilities. 

It isn’t brave to stay alive. It’s the easiest thing in the world. There isn’t a beast in this world that goes down to an oasis to drink and then instead, decides to slit its own throat. 

But then I look away for just a moment, and heaven is gone again. I lose sight of the secret corridor. I lose my faith. Getting out of bed hurts. Music loses its ability to make me shiver. I become unalive.

Sometimes I ask myself why such an old and ordinary pain feels so new each time. It’s like I keep hiding the same revelation, over and over again, from my eyes.

I don’t have an intelligence problem. I don’t have a productivity problem. I’ve solved almost every issue I’ve had. I’ve gotten almost everything I ever desired. I don’t feel like I lack talent or ability.

I have to accept that a big part of me just wants to suffer. I want to find something wrong with my life. I want to believe I can’t trust anyone. I want to hate, and lash out, and separate myself from the rest of the world. Suffering is my precious jewel that I keep reaching for. It’s the enthralling darkness that I stare into like I’ll find anything but tmy own corrupted reflection. It’s my protective armor. It’s my aesthetic. It’s my sense of romance.

I am Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill, year after year, and I am not happy because it’s my suffering that promises to sustain me.

In one hand I hold my glowing seed. My hope and my dreams and my vision of heaven. My little taste of happiness that’s like thinned out honey.

But clutched to my chest is my little blue book of pain.

Maybe once I understand that, really understand it, I can finally let it go.

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