In three days, Bluefish returns to the England whose clouds were at her feet back in July, whose limp little summer was but a cold shadow of the ones to which she is accustomed.
It isn't her return which brings about my suffering: no, it is something far less significant - yet, clearly, no less worthy of discussion.
(When I was a child, and later an awkward teenager, I found that it was always the throwaway remarks which delivered the seed around which my misery grew - being told by my father that I had no friends, for example. The remark was not spoken with malice or intent to wound, but that's nevertheless how I processed it.)
The limitations of English, or of the limitations under which I use it, are causing me a problem. Hurt, when it is the description of something done by one person to another, almost always carries with it the idea of guilt and intent:
- stop twisting my arm behind my back! You're hurting me!
- some internet scammers cleaned out your bank account? Ouch, that's gotta hurt!
- [as above in parentheses] the way in which you just addressed me has hurt me
The word I seek doesn't exist, or at least I don't know it. I want to define something innocuous and natural that nevertheless punctures. In addition, I wish it to be understood that being punctured does not diminish the sentiment held for the person who made the puncture.
On the contrary, I assert that such a wound is one of the definining characteristics of love. Hence there is no sense of biding one's time before administering forgiveness, for there is nothing to atone for. We are, instead, grateful.
What fact might it have been that Bluefish stated which caused and continues to cause me such anguish?
It was this: I have only ever seen snow once in my lifetime.
All my sentiment came rushing to the surface, akin to a bottle which has been shaken up and then opened, or a tributary rushing towards the roar of the sea.
I am yet to work out quite what caused the puncture wound; I only know that something did - perhaps it is the stark confirmation of our distance, and I marvel all the more about how we can be so close.
