Pain. Pain. You know your name.

Who would have thought that hurt could be decanted and revisited again and again only to find its bouquet sharpened, its pungence heightened, its deleterious effects made more acute. Realizations are a funny thing. One finds something out, and it is as if the revelation changes everything. When it changes nothing, in fact. History isn't rewritten. Ever. It is what it is. It is as it was.

I had a wonderful, spiritual, and thoroughly uplifting evening, despite the lobbing of barbs at my tender heart. I am glad to be able to see beyond things that cut to the very core of me. I am relieved.

But sometimes it seems as if joy is a mere distraction from sorrow. That pleasure is only a vacation from pain. I value permanence. I seek solid things. Things that can be counted on. Things that will see me through. I have not had such steadfastness for a long time. And I have recently begun to feel its absence more palpably than ever before. I was once a little ray of sunshine. The apple of my father's eye. The smilingest girl with the pinkest, roundest cheeks and the greatest affinity for joy and laughter and forgetting of all things unpleasant. The sweet little cherub who couldn't hold a grudge. Even when she tried. I was once a soft, sweet, eager thing. I was once less vulnerable. Made impervious to disappointment by my very naïveté. I once believed in many things.

I no longer know what I believe. Nor what I expect. I only know that I have been wronged a good many times. And I have heard apologies in far fewer numbers. I must seek out another means of achieving balance.