I’m Addicted to Pain

Chau Nguyen
Jul 28, 2017 · 4 min read
Aren’t we all addicts?

I can’t feel love when I’m not in pain. You?

I think we are all addicted to pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain. Psychological pain. And the combination of all. That’s why we got stuck in a fatal cycle of loving and suffering.

When I was 13, I had a so-called boyfriend. He was very smart, and his English was really good, which to a bunch of Vietnamese schoolgirls was impressive and admirable. He was popular at school. Students from other classes would drop by ours to ask him to hang out. Oh yea, we were classmates. I sat behind him in class. I really liked him. I also thought he was unapproachable.

When we finally got together, I was constantly trying to catch up with him. I felt he was way over my league and I can never be as cool as him. Despite all his effort to tell me otherwise, that I’m pretty, that I speak English even better than him, that I would get into even better high school than him, despite all his compliments and encouragement, I chose to hold on to my ideology, that I’m not good enough for him. It hurt. But in a satisfying way.

I never told my high school crush that I liked him. We met again last June during my visit to home in Hanoi, and I still felt the same way I did when I first met him. It’s like I never ceased to like the dude, and we totally did not just meet after 2 years apart. It hurt. It hurt because he was even more popular than before. He couldn’t t stop his phone from blowing off every 10 minutes with calls from girls and friends. His profile picture had almost 300 likes. Some big-deal company offer him a paid internship and research fund (I think, I actually have no idea, that could be a fantasy I have about him in my head). I looked at him, and wonder if I can ever good enough for him to catch his attention. I was, once again since high school, drowning in insecurity.

We went to a prom together when we were in high school. I asked him out, and he said Okay. That was since then the greatest shame of my life. When the music for the slow dance started, I told him that he could ask his ex girlfriend to dance if he wanted to. He hesitated for a second, then dropped my hand, and went looking for her. He was just not interested. It hurt.

The pain was massive and became almost unbearable at times. He then dated other girls from our class, became close to my friends but always kept a distance from me. Only cool people could hang out with him. When we parted, he to the U.S and I to Europe, I cried day and night. I couldn’t destroy the monument of my idol that I had put so much effort into building and polishing. I’d rather suffering in pain for the rest of my youth just to preserve my dear god — than to living without any feelings towards anyone at all. It hurt like hell.

Love hurts. Without pain, how else would you know that you’re in love?

You can never know how much you love a man until he put his arm around her waist and they stood a little too close and seem a bit too intimate together, and it hurts you so much seeing that. You want to cry. You want to rip the fat off your body and burn all your ugly clothes, as if that could make you more beautiful than her. You want to run away. You want to hide away. But you don’t want the pain to stop. Because you deserve it. You’ve earned it. The moment you chose to be with him, you expose yourself to machine guns and nuclear weapons that can ravage your soul, and you chose him still.

Nothing tastes more glorifying than a bleeding heart.

Maybe two bleeding hearts?

.

.

Oh you think you’re the only one’s suffering from this depressing love, darling?

He can’t find himself. He needs time alone. He has his dreams and passions too. He must go. He can’t deal with your mental breakdown right now.

That’s what happened last week, last month, 3 months before that, 5 months before that, and it will continue. The same problem. The same complaint. The same conversation. The same excuse. The same pain.

Although, it hurts today a little less than it used to.

I’m getting concerned.

I really can’t love without pain, honey.

Chau Nguyen

Written by

Sunny With A Chance Of Paranoid Attack

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