Aristotle hypothesised that pain and pleasure exist in a continuum; pleasure brings the soul into a normal state of being, pain achieves the opposite. Aside from my irritation with the use of the word ‘normal’, I really cannot agree.

For one thing, there are so many forms of pain, some exquisite, some devastating. A hot piece of metal can burn, sear your skin so that it breaks and bubbles and boils beneath. It hurts, true, but in that instant of pain the world is lost to you; the mind is silenced by the body’s ache, rather than the body being crippled by the mind’s confusion. And after, that overflow of endorphins that floods every cell in your being? Better than sex. Better than the most scintillating orgasm, for it does not come at the price of having to allow another person to violate you, or perhaps the price of violating another person. When all is said and done what, really, is the difference?

I never could understand why it is called making love, when the only emotion I have associated with the act since Luke is a crushing sense of shame. Even with Luke, I was often left frozen after the fact, unable to move, or speak, for I simply had to lie there, curled into a ball, holding myself together for fear of falling apart under the force of what I had let him do to me, and not just in a physical sense.

There was one exception of course, the only time in my life when I have understood the meaning, felt it, and been able to relish the experience as it should be enjoyed.

The pity was that it only happened once. It only silenced my cyclic thoughts of a short time, because it was never repeated.

Pain, I have found, is the only thing that can silence the noise, and for a few blissful seconds, as skin touches metal, I do not have to feel anything else.

Could there be a pleasure as great as a reprieve from constant agony? I think not, and yet they call it pain, call it harm.

I call it Nirvana.

 Excerpt from Death Becomes Me