empty trails

What if pain
was never the absence of happiness?

Like darkness
isn’t detachment of sunlight.
Like cold
isn’t the absence of heat.

It’s just a lower amount of thermal energy,
not a seperate, opposing energy entity.

What if the opposite of joy isn’t pain-

it’s hollow,

like empty trails
with no footprints
to follow.

What if pain
isn’t even the pain of broken bones?
Even when your knees start cracking
because they haven’t been rotated enough.
Your opposite side screaming at night
from carrying all the load and protecting,
all the fractures and rupture that you don’t dare roll onto.

What if pain
isn’t even the paralysing enforcement of stillness
Not even when you wake up everyday
in the same clothes,
in the same bed,
staring out the same window

with the same debilitating symptoms
pinning you there.

Because breathing icy air
is still better than no air.