There is the pain that can be given a name. On the one hand, it is the most painful, physical pain. Then I can point it with my finger and reaffirm my pointing with the words “There it sits, the pain!” This is very practical, because one knows exactly what is going on. The others, who are told of the pain, can breathe a sigh, because you can do something. A lot of good advice is given, and then you go back, glad to have contributed your part to the recovery. What a good man you are. On the other hand, it is perhaps the less painful, but equally painful, pain to be felt. A relationship goes into the fractions or one falls through a test. You lose the workplace or the gold watch you got to the confirmation, if that still exists. There, too, one can be sure of being overwhelmed by the positive explanations of support. Use mostly for nothing. However, allegedly not.
And then there is the pain that has no name. It can neither be physically nor tangibly fixed, just one without a name. Most of the time, it comes out of nothing, or apparently from this, because in reality – and that is now a physically explainable – nothing comes out of nothing. Probably not even the nothing itself. But my feeling is not concerned either with physics or with so-called reality. But it is only seemingly so, for actually it is always there, I want to be quite honest with myself, which I am in the rarest cases. The nameless pain sits in a corner of my center of life, waiting for things to come. It is in no hurry, because it knows that I cannot escape it. Well hidden under sunshine and serenity, it waits calmly. Also business and confidence are probate means to ignore it. Sometimes, however, when the sun has gone down, and the serenity of a disastrous sobriety, when the activity comes to a standstill, when I am condemned to stopping, and confidence is swept away by exhaustion, it sits open and accessible and grins at me.
And suddenly it seems to me that I am completely empty because I have given everything I could give. No words, no gestures, no deeds, nothing that could fill this emptiness, and at the same time this emptiness is surrounded by a robust, sound-proof steel wall. It is that moment when I realize again and again that I cannot reach you, not where it is needed. As close as you may be to me, you always remain alien, outside and lost. Just like me. Never can we really get together. You will always stay away from me as far as the next galaxy. Although there is nothing, that I wish more, then to be with you when I am with you, to be near you when I am near you. It’s not working. I cannot get out of myself like you are not from you. I cannot find the way to you because there is none. The loneliness, which cannot be bridged, ties my throat together and takes the words. As if there had been some. Perhaps I could call it the pain of existential solitude, one that always remains, one that we cannot escape because it is anchored in us. But would not it mean, by giving it a name, that I would give it an entitlement?
I want to leave it. Instead, I am eager to collect sunshine and serenity, business, and confidence under which I hide it. Out of sight, out of mind. It will work as it has done so many times before. For a while. At least that. To do as though. It does not matter. I got used to it. You have to be good to yourself, not just to others. It has to hold out. Only for a lifetime. This is quite feasible. I will not lose it, the pain. It is a standing constant. Perhaps the only one. Nevertheless, it is to remain what it is, a nameless pain.
