# Pain And Suffering I do not know why pain comes, why it settles in the chest like fog, why the heart learns to beat differently when sorrow arrives unannounced. I have read the philosophies— how suffering ennobles, how it teaches, how through the furnace of anguish we emerge as gold. But I have also seen the way pain simply breaks things, leaves them broken. There is no dignity in it always. Sometimes it is only the body's grammar gone wrong, the mind's arithmetic spiraling into subtraction. Yet I have noticed this: in the presence of another's suffering, we become less small. The walls we build around ourselves grow thin, and something like recognition passes between us— a knowing that we are all equally fragile, equally subject to the body's betrayals, the heart's inexplicable fractures. Perhaps this is what they meant, those philosophers with their grand words: not that pain is good, but that it unmasks us, strips away the elaborate disguises, and shows us finally— bone and breath, vulnerability and grace, all of us wounded, all of us still somehow here.

It is simple. Our pain comes not from the things lived, but from the things that were dreamed of and did not come to be fulfilled.

Why do we suffer? Because we automatically forget what was enjoyed and we begin to suffer for our unrealized projections, for all the cities that we would have liked to have known alongside our love and we do not know, for all the pleasures we would have liked to have had and we have not had, for all the shows and books and silences that we would have liked to have shared and we did not share. For all the canceled kisses, for eternity.

We suffer not because our work is exhausting and pays little, but for all the free hours we no longer have to go to the movies, to talk to a friend, to swim, to date. We suffer not because we do wrong things, but for the punishment we get despite doing right things.

We suffer not because our mother is impatient with us, but for all the moments when we could be confided to her our deepest anguish if she were interested in understanding us.

We suffered not because our team lost, but because of the suffocated euphoria.

We suffer not because we grow old, but because the future is being confiscated from us, thus preventing a thousand adventures from happening to us, all those we dream of and never get to experience.

Why do we suffer so much for love? The right thing would be for us not to suffer, just thank you for meeting such a nice person, who generated in us an intense feeling and that gave us company for a reasonable time, a happy time.

How to relieve the pain of what has not been lived? The answer is as simple as a verse: Deluding yourself less and living longer!

Every day I live, I more convince myself that the waste of life is in love that we do not give, in the forces we do not use, in the selfish prudence that risks nothing, and that, dodging suffering, we also lose happiness.