Pain Courts

Pain Courts

Pain seduces you slowly, until one morning you wake to find its toothbrush in your bathroom, its underwear in your laundry basket, its non-fat vanilla soy milk in your fridge. Saturday mornings, Pain sips coffee with you on the sofa, laughs over New Yorker cartoons. Soon, you take Pain home to meet your family. It sits between you and Grandma at the long table, leaves with you at dusk and complains bitterly the whole drive home of the many miles, the bread pudding, the early Monday to come. Inseparable, Pain helps prepare taxes, pick paint for kitchen walls, trim toe nails. Each night before bed, it hums between the sheets; Pain is needy, doesn’t like when you’re unconscious, wakes you the moment you dream of something else.