Castles in the Sky

˙⋆ Please Rate Your Pain ⋆˙

"What kind of pain is it?"

The nurse asked

Before listing off different synonyms:

Dull, sharp, radiating, throbbing, shooting.

For someone who's good with words,

I suddenly felt helpless

To describe the kind of pain

Coming from my foot.

I never had trouble explaining the pain

You caused.

Those words bubbled up

Without any effort:

Betrayal, gaslighting, shattering.

The words of your actions never required effort

To conjure like a whisp:

Wreckage, destruction, broken.

Had the nurse asked

For me to rate my pain,

I don't know if I could've.

Had God asked me to rate the damage

You inflicted,

The answer wouldn't have been as high

As I now realize it was.

I wouldn't have admitted

Just how much you hurt me

Because I knew it was never intentional.

But even so,

You will never be my Ten.

I experienced Ten far too young

When God revealed how swiftly He can call us home

And away from our castles in the sky.

In that moment,

When I hung up the phone and burst into tears,

I remember realizing that you were not my Ten.

No matter how many tears I cried,

How many times I sobbed myself into oblivion,

How many seconds, minutes, hours, days I wished I could go back,

I never once thought

"This is my Ten."

Because grief is all relative:

Incomparable in every way,

But still tethered to the scale.

You left more marks than my Ten.

You haunt me more than my Ten.

And yet...

I think I can finally say,

"I hope that one day I look back

And smile with the same fondness

I have for my Ten."

I think I'm finally ready to admit

That when I type those words

I really mean it.