Guilt, 2024

Olena Kainska  

It is impossible to heal what you don't feel. And I haven't felt anything for a long time. I've unlearned myself to feel so as not to suffer, not to worry. I clamped down on all these feelings, wove them between the muscle fibers of my back, shoulders, and neck. I remember the burial of my grandmother. I stood in the church and looked at her in the coffin and thought how badly the gravediggers had combed her hair and how small she looked, as if her soul weighed more than her body. I cried a lot from pity for my grandmother, and that pain wove threads between my muscles, fixed with pain, and stiffened.

And I carried that pain with me, and it was with me all the time. In order to continue to function and work. I taught myself not to feel it, to eliminate it, to level it, to deny it.

And one day God, the great and omnipotent, decided that he was tired of looking at that shame and decided to heal me. And in order for me to feel that old pain, it had to be hurt me even more, God thought. And he made it so that I tore the tendons in my shoulder. In the shoulder where all the guilt had accumulated. Everything I was guilty of before my grandmother, before my parents, before my friends, before strangers on the trolley, before the woman at the cash register, before neighbors, before people on the other side of the globe who had never seen me and knew nothing about me.

And that pain began to bring me back to myself. I started listening to myself more, trying to hear that quiet story of my muscles. To record that song they sing very quietly. Record it and keep it, because it is important. I began to hear how much I hurt, that I had to live with my injury all alone and had no one to lean on. I have no one to cry to, no one to listen, and no one to help. I began to hear myself saying that I had completely stopped relying on others, and only on myself. I began to hear how I had loaded up all the things I had to do, both my own and everyone else's, because only I could do them, and no one else. I began to hear how I could hear others well, but I could not hear myself at all.