The duration of pain...

It’s been a really long time that I wrote something and tonight I just feel like taking my laptop and penning down some thoughts that have been for some reason or the other occurring to me since evening and since there is no reason the thoughts should come to me, I sit back and ask myself. “What is the duration of pain?” or “How long should pain last?” Pain happens and goes away but the scars are deep; they rise in some cauldron of our hearts and engulf us for a long long time to come, long after they have happened; long after you have sobbed your pillows to tears; long after you have stared blankly at that mirror showing the reflection of a person that appears like you, sans all the joi-de-vivre and apparently asking God, “Why me?? Why did it have to be me?”. Long after pain loosens its apparent grip over you, it revisits you time and again in the most unconnected of moments. You never know when the unwanted visitor comes knocking at the doorsteps of your mind and completely derails your present. Somehow the word transience doesn’t apply to pain. It never goes away, it keeps coming back. Hence there is nothing called the duration of pain. At max, it can be broadly categorized into two categories- one when it is all encompassing and the other, when it is episodic. Pain, after it is gone, is extremely episodic in nature. You have apparently moved on in life but then for some reason or the other, the shit thing comes up all over again; you don’t know what triggers that; maybe that gaze at the calm sea, maybe that calling of a particular name; maybe the mention of some topic; maybe the sight of a particular beverage; something or the other will happen and then you have had it. You are lost and deep down you really cry badly. Cry because you have lost something dear; cry because few things you cherished in life are no more with you; cry because you have come to kissing distance with grabbing your dreams and then had to let it just go. Yes, kissing distance; f#$#ing kissing distance. And that hurts. Why? Because having come so close was like a glimpse of what could have happened; and along that journey of getting the glimpse, you have created memories, the same memories, which albeit a source of happiness when there is nothing to look around, is also the reason of pain many a times. If pain is not preceded by immense pleasure, I believe the situation gets highly ameliorated but this inadvertent sequence whereby pain follows heights of pleasure magnifies the sadness and also creates enough memory, which you sigh at; because they have given you a picture of an otherwise sexed out life which in reality and at present is completely (at least on a relative scale) f#@$ed up. Long time back, I was generally talking to a physiatrist and he was telling me that the biggest reasons people decay is because they cannot move on. They just cannot let go of their pasts and look forward to what life has to offer and in this context he was saying that it’s very important for people to remain happy as that will take away their thoughts from the past to the present. To this I generally asked him, “and what if the past has been so damn good that the present can never ever match upto that?” He smiled…I got my answer….