The Wound You Keep Returning To

“On the strange comfort of pain we already know.”

They say the only way to heal is to stop touching it. But no one tells you how addicting it is — to press your finger into the place that hurts, just to make sure you can still feel something.

Because the pain reminds you it was real. It happened. It was real.

I think people revisit the things they know are killing them because they believe that if they stare at the damage long enough, it will finally make sense. That eventually, they’ll be able to understand why things happened the way they did. Maybe they can find a reason for their suffering.

Human beings are desperate creatures. We require something to lean on. We need explanations for everything.

We need to believe there was a reason the knife entered where it did

a reason someone left

a reason our childhood happened the way it did.

The reason our parents failed us.

The reason the world failed us.

So we return to the wound, believing we might find closure behind all the blood and soft tissue.

But sometimes there is no deeper meaning. It was always going to happen the way it did, one day or another.

All we can decide is whether to keep bleeding over it — because wounds do not heal overnight, especially when you keep poking at them, trying to remember exactly how they split open.

Sometimes you have to leave it as it is. Even if ugly scars remain, they will remind you who you are.

And there will come a point where you realize the wound was never the thing that was hurting you.

It was you.

“Leave it. Let it close. Let it become just another thing that happened.”