I Stopped Mentioning It

"How is the back?"

"Fine."

She says it without looking up, because looking up is how they find out. She says it in the voice that closes a subject. And her husband, who loves her, says good, and goes back to the sink, because that is what fine is for.

It is not fine. It has not been fine since a Tuesday in February two years ago. It is a low grinding ache from the belt line up into the right shoulder blade, worse in the cold, worse after the stairs, worst at about four in the afternoon for reasons nobody has ever explained to her. She has an appointment in nine weeks. She has a box of things that take the edge off some days and not others.

But she has done the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is why she says fine.

The first time you say it, people lean in. The fifth time, they ask a good question. The twentieth time, something changes in the room. Not unkindness. Just a small tiredness in the face of the person listening, a flicker of the thing they are not saying, and she saw it once, about eleven months in, and she has never risked it again.

So she stopped mentioning it. She stopped putting it in messages. She stopped answering honestly at the door. She stopped, and she will tell you it was a kindness, and she is partly right, and that is the trap.

Because here is what she did not know she was also doing. Every time she said fine, she filed the day. The pain happened, and then it went nowhere. No witness, no record, nobody who knew. Two years of days that hurt and were never written down anywhere at all.

And a person can carry pain for a very long time. What breaks a person is carrying it uncounted.

Somebody has been writing it all down

I want to put one verse in front of you, and I want you to hear who wrote it. A man on the run, hunted, sleeping rough, with nobody to tell.

You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?Psalm 56:8

Count. Bottle. Book.

Three words, and every one of them is an act of record keeping.

The tossings are the turnings in the night. Not the crisis, the ordinary wretched shifting of a body that cannot get comfortable, the thing nobody sees and nobody counts because there is nothing to count it with. He says God counts them. Not observes. Counts. There is a number, and Someone knows it.

The bottle is a small flask, the kind kept for what is precious. He is saying that the wet on his face at three in the morning was gathered up and kept, not wiped away and forgotten. Nothing you have cried has evaporated.

And the book is the one that settles it. What is in a book can be read back. It is not a feeling about you. It is a record, and it exists whether or not you ever said a word.

Now hear what that does to two years of fine.

You thought those days went nowhere. They did not. Every one of them was witnessed. Every four o'clock ache, every stair you took sideways, every time you turned the conversation because you could not face saying it again. Written down. All of it. By Someone who was not tired of you on the twentieth telling, or the two hundredth, or today.

Let me name the pit before I go one step further, because I am not going to skip over it.

You are lonely inside your own body. That is the real weight and hardly anyone names it. The pain is bad and the loneliness of the pain is worse, and the worst part of the loneliness is that you built it yourself, out of love, to protect people. You are tired of being a weather report. You are tired of being the one who is always a bit unwell. You have started to suspect that the truest thing about you now is boring, and that if you said it plainly one more time you would become the thing you dread, which is a burden.

Hear me. You are not a burden, and saying it again is not complaining. Complaining is telling a lie about God. Telling the truth about your body is not a lie about anything.

The Man we follow was called a Man of Sorrows and He was acquainted with grief, which is a strange thing to say about God unless God actually intends to know what this is like from the inside. He is not braced for your sentence. He is not managing His face while you speak.