pain is the breaking of the shell
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. The question is whether the shell is one meant to be cracked, as in the shell of a nut or seed, or one wherein cracking means a broken spine, desiccation, certain death.
When the pain is of a specific kind, you know deep down, no matter how often you try to twist it into having a worth, your shell is that of a snail or turtle, and you are just dead meat waiting to be consumed. That pain brings you an understanding of what it feels like to know, to dread your own sibling’s hug because of what will follow. The understanding of what follows, of adulthood. Adulthood is knowing what’s happening and with it, knowing why you’re in pain, wishing that knowledge made it hurt less but it didn’t. Doesn’t.
You try to take your understanding and use it somehow, write your way out of the pain, write what it feels like to be beneath his hands, write what you struggle to put to words verbally, and no, the words aren’t jumping out to a literary audience either, they’re hiding themselves away. Maybe the pain didn’t bring you understanding at all, just another layer of separation between yourself and The World where siblings squabble and love each other but not in That Way. Not in That Way, and yet he only loves you when you’re under him, providing sensory stimulation, and what else can you do but do what he wants? What else can you do but pretend it isn’t pain at all?
The tears are from the winter wind whipping it’s way through your scarf, against your eyes, in no way related to too large hands and hushed breathes and “he doesn’t mean any harm” so no harm was done. No harm was done. No harm was done. You’re not in pain; you’re not real.
None of what happened to you really happened, so you’ll write about it two days later like it’s a story about understanding, like you’re a walnut shell, not a snail clinging desperately to your body-home. You understand. You’re not in pain, not when you read story after story about your favorite characters suffering the same way you did, not when you ask in a thinly veiled plea fic the author has experienced what they write about only to learn no, you really are alone, your suffering can be described even by those who don’t understand, are only imagining the pain of having their body used against them, their reactions excuses, their excuses justifications, those justifications signs you deserved it. You don’t have anyone telling you otherwise but these fiction authors imagining themselves in your reality, so you let yourself be comforted by mirages, let the Sun dry your snail skin from your cracked shell. Understand that nothing is real, not your pain, not you. Nothing.