You say Only Once like it is less than the zero times it has happened to someone else, like you should have amassed a collection for it to hold any weight.
Pain and trauma is a subjective thing, a relative thing—your brain can only judge them against what it has lived through before. If there are other, greater pains in the world, your brain won’t believe you. You can’t sit it and the pain down to reason with them, use analogies to explain directly to the pain—you shouldn’t even be here. It just lodges itself more insistently against your ribs, expands until it’s too difficult to breathe, or until your heart curls in on itself and refuses to feel.
Pain wants comfort.
You know this.
You would gather another’s pain to your chest and its heartbeat, in a heartbeat.
So let yourself fucking mourn when your own pain comes, you beautiful, radiant disaster.
You’re allowed to respect yourself at least that much.
Especially if no one else will.
.
2018. Prose.