They say that is impossible to remember pain.
If you could remember it you would actually feel it. Physically I mean.
Well, I can tell the mysterious “they” that they’re wrong.
To this day I can recall the pain and how it seemed to explode from my ears. I felt deafened by it and still my ears seem to ring with an agonising burst of sound.
I can recall as a child I would violently rub my eyes until a great and glorious starburst of colour would take over my entire vision like a kaleidoscope. The pain I felt did that too.
I don’t even have to close my eyes to bring back the images of that day. But it isn’t the agony, or the weight of him or even the smell of him that tortures me most. It is the betrayal of trust, the broken faith that cuts the deepest. Even the fact that the sun was shining hurts. How could the birds go on singing when the shattered remains of my faith lay at my feet, disintegrating into nothing? Shouldn’t the world have stopped, if only for a moment?
The rest of that day is a blur. Not forgotten through time, but a haze removed from my mind at once. Brain overload perhaps. What I do remember is the fear in his eyes and the shaky tremor in his voice, uncertain and weak. I keep hold of that, and know he carries it with him, even all these years later. The nagging doubt that it may yet come back to haunt him.
On darkest days I allow my mind to wander through scenarios of vengeance. A cryptic letter in the post maybe, or a phone call heavy with suggestion that the time has come.
Time to pay.
But nothing would undo that day. No matter what, the terrible business of it would always have happened, even long after I am dust in the ground and our time is done. But the knowledge that his life goes on unchanged is sometimes too much to bear and the injustice of that is a hot blade in my heart. Despite all that, it is the ringing in my ears that is hotter and harsher than that blade. The memory has become an almost constant companion, like an unwanted friend you just can’t rid yourself of. One that chatters incessantly and chips away at your sanity.
Even the anniversary is recalled every year, and celebrated like a death; a morbid recollection of time and place. But there is no grave at which I can mourn, no place at which I can leave flowers.
I don’t know what I should be doing with the memory, or where I should put it, so it sits in a little quarter of my mind, festering and living on.
Like him.