Disclaimer: I do not own the "official" story of Kingdom Hearts, or any story that I may reflect;
I only own the reflections I create.
Be prepared to think,
and, hopefully, to enjoy.
Kingdom Hearts
In Dreams
How do you describe pain?
It's a two-fold problem. First, pain itself is a natural sensation, a biological warning from you to you that something is wrong. If you feel pain, then the world is not right; you are hurt, and you need to do something about it fast. In short, it's a survival mechanism – a cruel, unapologetically blunt alarm that if you don't set things right, you could die. It's loud, garish, intrusive, and unashamedly in-our-face.
That being the case, it's almost impossible to look at it; like a picture, the details fade as you look at it more and more closely, until finally the image is right up to your eyes and the whole thing has blurred into obscurity. You can't understand it yourself, much less make someone else understand. Pain is just the same. In the end, you have to see the smudge for yourself.
The second problem is that there are so many different kinds of pain. Pain can come from any direction in any way at any time. You could stumble and jam your toe in the doorway. You could be shot in the back by an angry thief. You could cut yourself shaving. You could slam into concrete from a fall of a hundred feet. There are a thousand ways to hurt, and once you've felt every one, there's another thousand waiting in line, just like the thousands behind them. Each one is new, personal, and infinitely unique; no two pains are the same, no two injuries identical. With so many ways to hurt, it's all but impossible to find some way to relate them all, to find a single sensation that draws all the different hurts into a single definition: pain.
With all these things to consider, I can't hope to find some way to describe pain for everyone everywhere. In the end, it's impossible anyway. I'm not everyone; I'm me. And I'm not everywhere; I'm here. I'm me, here and now, and I only know the pain I have known. So, for the sake of this amateur memoir, I can only resort to describe pain the way I've always felt it: like fire.
Fire irreversibly changed my life, and it's burned its image into my mind and even into my being. Maybe that's why I see pain in terms of fire: because it fits so well. Sometimes it burns and boils in a sudden blaze, evidence of a sudden, shocking injury that can hurt so much that the fire borders on the likeness of lightning. Sometimes it smokes and smolders in a low burn, testifying of a vicious, tenacious hurt that won't go away. More often, the pain is a feeling of emptiness, like the charred aftermath or a horrible fire, turning everything good and bright into cold, dull ash. All the same, the distinction – pain is fire – is all too clear to me. And I suppose that one of my main goals in writing this story is to make you understand why it's so glaringly bright to me.
So if I'm going to make you understand, I guess I should explain why I seem so obsessed with pain, with understanding and explaining it to you. My life began in pain, both mine and my mothers, and while the worst of it slacked off, a low, slow smolder never ceased to smoke somewhere deep down. It's lasted my entire life, and it will go on until the day I die. Now, on this side of life, I've finally come to realize that life is pain itself; it goes on, growing and shrinking as life happens, and while we may become distracted and find ways to ignore our pain, we're never totally rid of it. If life is pain, therefore, then to understand pain is to understand life.
And understanding life was something I really, really wanted when my story really began: with a strange, mysterious dream, where reality broke in two and a dead girl visited me from another side.