Author's Notes: This was an English assignment--a descriptive essay. Not sure if this was what she wanted, but yeah. Love it, hate it, but please reveiw. Thanks. : )

Pain
By The Gemini Sage

Have you ever been at school during a fire drill, and you’ve gotten seriously annoyed by the fire alarm?

Like at first, it’s just annoying, you know? Just a little sound. But then as it goes on and on, that sound gets bigger and bigger, and soon that little sound is so loud and awful that after awhile you have to clap your hands over the ears because you’re just so desperate to shut it out, to get it out of your head, but of course it doesn’t help. The sound just penetrates your skull and bounces around your brain, and even though all you want is for it to stop, there’s nothing you can do to make it stop, so you don’t have a choice but to just sit it out.

And wait.

Pain is like that. At first it tingles in the back of your brain, like pricking your finger on a splinter or smelling something sour. Just a paper cut inflicted with words, it doesn’t matter. But after awhile you start to notice, and suddenly it’s not just a little splinter any more, and it does matter, because it’s like someone is twisting a knife in your gut.

Pain is like cooking, or maybe like a math equation, or maybe even like chemistry. Because it can never happen by itself.

For instance, you can feel sad, and that’s a big part of pain, but pain is much more than sadness. Sadness is just one of the feelings; it weighs you down like there’s something heavy in your chest. But pain is more.

Pain is a sadness so deep and heavy and strong you feel like everything in the world is wrong and nothing could ever be good again, and you could cry all the tears in the world and it could never be enough. Pain is anger, anger that makes your blood feel like it’s on fire and your chest ready to explode with the heat of it. It’s guilt, guilt that makes you squirm inside yourself at night when you’re trying to sleep.

Pain is hatred, for yourself and those around you, a hate so strong you could tear everyone else apart with your bare hands and cut yourself to ribbons. Pain is grief, a loss so deep that leaves a gaping hole in your heart that not even the anger or sadness can fill. It’s heartbreak, being rejected by someone you had once said you would give your life for, knowing that they don’t care about you at all, that they’ve gotten a replacement, someone better, after all you did for them.

Pain is deep, like that knife in your gut. Pain hurts, like that fire alarm that just won’t shut up. It’s heavy, heavier than a two-ton weight crushing your whole body. It suffocates you, it paralyzes you, so that you can’t move or talk or even breathe. Pain means you’re about to bust because you just can’t stand it. It’s horrible.

Imagine you were a bottle, made of the most fragile glass—because human beings can be very, very fragile. Take all those things that make up pain, all those emotions, and stuff them inside you, no matter how hard it is. It’s so big it barely fits, but shake up the bottle anyway, and watch fizz up like cheap soda from a vending machine, watch it get even bigger, make the pressure even worse.

That is pain.

Now plaster a smile on your face, a smile made of glass just like the rest of you.

You have to wonder how long that glass will hold under that pressure before it explodes because it can’t take the pressure for one more second, before those sharp glass shards start flying everywhere, cutting up everything and everyone they touch.

It’s certainly a concept, isn’t it?

This is how I feel. This is how I live. I am in pain—no, the pain is in me.

I just hope to God that my glass bottle never breaks.

AN: Okay, so it's a little emo. :shrug: Sorry.