Chapter 25

There was once a girl who could feel no pain. Emotionally she was a mess, always depressed. Physically however, nothing could hurt her. Even though she was mentally unstable, she felt invincible. The girl was in college at the time of her death, studying to become a psychologist. She’d always been fascinated by the human psyche and how the brain reacts to different situations and scenarios. Her final semester was based around how humans deal with pain, versus how they deal with the fear of pain. This was right up her alley as someone who never knew what physical pain felt like, but drowned daily in her own emotional suffering.

Ever since she was a little girl, her pain receptors never seemed to work properly. She could feel touch, and sensations, but as soon as that soft touch became a sharp pain, it would simply vanish. For a long time her parents and teachers tried to keep her safe from all possible dangers, but soon realized it was impossible to protect the girl from the world, and from herself.

From a very young age, she would always get picked on or made fun of for being different. She particularly remembered a single boy always teased her. Because of him, she quickly learned to pretend to feel pain like everyone else. 

“OUCH,” she would yell when she tripped and scraped her knee. “AH,” she would shout when she stubbed her toe. After a while, everyone seemed to forget that she couldn’t feel anything at all.

Then came the days when she became curious about herself, wanting to know more about how she differs from the rest of the world. It was just small things at first; she would prick her finger with a pin, or slap an elastic band around her wrist, but that became tiresome real quick. The more depressed she became about the world around her, the more she wanted to focus inward, discovering more about her limits. She escalated to things like placing her hand over fire, or filling the bathtub with extremely hot water. It turned out that she enjoyed the heat, no matter what it was. The cold was almost impossible for her to feel, but the heat warmed her soul. No matter how red her skin turned, she would only feel the comfort of the heat internally, as if wrapped in a warm blanket. The warmth soothed her depression, providing a solace that she hadn’t felt her entire life. For a long time the heat satisfied her, not needing to explore her pain any further.

It wasn’t until college that she decided it was time to try something new. The next stage in her self discovery was the beginning of the end. When her psychology research became about how humans deal with pain, versus how they deal with the fear of pain, it piqued her interest more than anything else. She wanted to know fear. She wanted to feel the difference between mental and physical pain. 

Her experiments on herself were brutal and exhausting. She would push her body to her limits day after day, hoping for some sort of answer, but nothing came. She stuck her hand in a pot of boiling oil, melting off her skin. She dropped a cement block on her foot, crushing her toes. She even used pliers to pull out a couple of her own teeth. Every week she would show up to class with a new cast or covered in more bandages. Whenever someone asked, she would laugh if off saying, “I’ve just got the worst luck,” or something of the sort.

After submitting her essay on the fear of pain, her professor failed her. When she asked why, her professor told her that sometimes the fear of pain is worse than the actual pain itself, and that her essay didn’t seem to understand the dichotomy between the two.

Frustrated, she came to the conclusion that the only way for her to learn the fear of pain, is for the pain to be so intense that her body could no longer keep it hidden. That’s when her suicide attempts began. She cut herself, tried sticking a fork in an outlet, overdosed on alcohol, and even jumped in front of a moving car, all to make herself feel something. All she wanted was to feel something.

After being released from the hospital for the fourth time in four months, she decided that if pain couldn’t scare her, then there was only one thing left that could. Death.

Having been depressed most of her life, she’s never been scared to die. Especially since she has no feelings of pain associated with it, she simply sees it as going to sleep, forever.

As she leaned forward, she thought to herself, This is it. This is the only thing left. Her body then fell from the bridge. As she flew toward the ground, the world around her began to slow. She heard the sound of the nearby train. She looked up at the sky, watching the birds fly all around her. She then looked down at the ground, growing closer. As her thoughts began to race, she imagined the face of her first crush, back when she was just a little girl; the boy who teased her about not feeling any pain. She began to wonder, maybe what was missing her whole life wasn’t the absence of pain. Maybe it was just the absence of love… Before she could feel anything, she felt nothing at all. 

It became too late. She never got the chance to feel anything again.