The Pit Learns my Name
2026 has felt less like a year than a place.
A low place. A place below the level of language. A corridor of muck and iron doors. The kind of place where something keeps moving, but not because it wants to. It moves because stopping would mean becoming part of the floor.
There have been bright spots. I know there have. My son was born. That sentence should arrive with its own light. It does, in some private chamber of me that nothing has managed to reach yet. I love him. I love my daughters. I love Christa. I love my family, immediate and extended, with the kind of love that keeps dragging a body back toward the living even when the body would rather become furniture.
So, no, this is not a complaint that life has given me nothing.
It has given me everything.
That may be part of what makes the rest feel so obscene.
I am safe. I am loved. I have people. I have a house. I have moments of joy that still arrive cleanly enough to hurt. My children still say things that make the whole awful machine of the world pause for half a second. Christa is still here. My parents are still here. My family keeps showing up. There is gratitude in me somewhere, not as an idea but as a pulse.
And, still.
The body remains the body.
The pit remains the pit.
The pain keeps humming through the walls.
It is brutal not being able to see. Brutal not being able to walk the way I want. Brutal when my voice catches or thins or fails to carry me across the small distance between what I mean and what someone hears. There is a particular humiliation in losing fluency with the world one ordinary function at a time. Not all at once. Not grandly. Not with music swelling behind it. Just daily erosion. A step gone here. A word gone there. A room becoming too large. A shower becoming a calculation. A body that used to be the instrument of my will becoming the broken gate I have to negotiate with first.
Pain is not dramatic enough. That is one of its cruelties.
If it were always spectacular, maybe it would be easier to explain. If it arrived wearing a mask and carrying a blade, people could see it. They could point. They could say, there, that is the thing hurting him.
Instead, so much of it is ambient. The low electrical whine. The bad current under the skin. The invisible pressure. The ache that has lived here so long it has started receiving mail.
Some days I feel less like a person in pain than a place pain has chosen to occupy.
Gratitude at the Bottom
I do not want to be dishonest about gratitude.
It is there. It matters. It is not fake. I am not performing some hardened refusal to notice what is good. There is good. There is so much good that on certain days it feels almost indecent to say how bad I feel.
That is the trap.
Love does not cancel pain. Gratitude does not sterilize despair. Safety does not make suffering imaginary. A warm house does not make the nervous system less hostile. A sleeping child does not restore speech. A hand on my shoulder does not make the legs answer cleanly.
These things help.
They do not redeem.
I keep returning to that distinction because I need it to be true. I need gratitude to be allowed in the room without being handed a mop and told to clean up the blood. I need love to remain love, not become some moral obligation to suffer beautifully.
There is a version of illness writing that turns everything into grace eventually. The broken body becomes a teacher. Pain becomes wisdom. Loss becomes a hidden corridor toward deeper appreciation. Maybe sometimes. Maybe for someone. Maybe on some days, after enough distance, a person can look back and find a shape worth naming.
I am not there.
I am in the thing.
I am in the pit with running water. I am in the stall that was never extra. I am in the nightly silence after the children are asleep, not transcending anything, not glowing with perspective, just sitting in the wreckage of capacity and being grateful that no one needs me for five minutes.
Sometimes the break I get at night is not peace. It is not restoration. It is just the absence of being asked to rise.
That is enough to feel almost holy, which is how desperate the scale has become.
I can sit. I can listen. I can stew in the shit of it. I can let the day drain out badly. I can stop measuring myself against the father I want to be, the husband I want to be, the son I want to be, the person I remember being, and just exist as a dim shape in a chair while some other voice fills the room.
That is not nothing.
It is also not enough.
Both are true, and the truth has no interest in being comforting.
The Fantasy of a Useful Ruin
I keep thinking of Le Guin’s Omelas.
Not because my life resembles that city. It doesn’t. My family is not feasting on my suffering. My pain is not the hidden engine of anyone’s happiness. No one I love has made a bargain with a locked room and a suffering child.
Still, the story leaves behind an afterimage.
A child in darkness. A social order built around not looking too closely. A terrible arrangement everyone knows and almost no one can bear to undo.
The part that touches something ugly in me is not exactly the moral structure. It is the possibility that suffering could be useful.
That is the thought I distrust and understand at the same time.
There are days when my body feels less like a body than a vessel. A jar for damage. A cellar where pain can be stored. Some furious, exhausted part of me thinks: fine, then use it. If this is what I am now, if this body is going to be a chamber of pressure and heat and bad signals, then let it serve some purpose. Let the pain collect here. Let it spare someone else.
I would take Christa’s pain if I could. I would take my children’s future griefs, their fear, their confusion, their loneliness, and pack them into the marrow if that were one of the options. I would take my parents’ worry and my family’s private aches and whatever hidden hurt the people I love are carrying and drag it down into this broken vessel with the rest.
That is not noble.
It is probably not even sane in the clean daylight of thought.
It is what love imagines when it cannot fix anything.
Because love wants to act. Love wants to lift. Love wants to intervene. Love wants to trade places with the suffering person, even when the suffering person is everyone at once and no trade is possible. When the body cannot do what love asks of it, the mind starts inventing darker economies.
Let me be useful as a ruin.
Let me be the place where the bad thing goes.
Let my suffering at least purchase someone else’s ease.
Of course, pain does not work that way. There is no transfer. No hidden pipe. No sacrificial plumbing beneath the house. My hurting does not keep anyone else from hurting. My fatigue does not refill Christa’s energy. My damaged vision does not sharpen anyone else’s sight. My failing legs do not strengthen my children’s steps.
The math is false.
The wish remains.
That might be the bleakest part: not the pain itself, but the mind’s attempt to make the pain mean something before it becomes unbearable that it may mean nothing at all.
Remaining as a Form of Refusal
I do not want to disappear.
That should be obvious, but some days I have to say it plainly to myself because the disease has its own slow rhetoric. It does not always argue by catastrophe. It argues by reduction. A little less movement. A little less speech. A little less confidence. A little less ease. A little less access to the ordinary world. It keeps revising the terms until survival starts to look like a series of concessions no one remembers agreeing to.
I am not depressed in the clean clinical sense, or at least that is not the word that feels most accurate. I can still laugh. I can still feel joy. I can still be pierced by tenderness. I can still hear a child’s voice and feel the whole brutal apparatus of existence become, for one second, worth defending.
But, I am sad a lot.
There it is.
Not poetically sad. Not attractively melancholic. Not sad in a way that makes me interesting at dinner. Just sad. Sad in the body. Sad in the throat. Sad in the part of the mind that has to keep updating the map. Sad because the losses are not hypothetical and the future is not abstract and the present already asks too much.
I am tired of translating that sadness into socially manageable units.
I am tired of making it smaller so other people do not have to stand too near it.
I am tired of being grateful in a way that reassures everyone I am still reasonable.
Some days I am not reasonable. Some days I am a man in a chair, furious at the distance between himself and the kitchen. Some days I am a father listening for his children and grieving all the versions of himself who could have reached them faster. Some days I am a husband watching his wife carry what should have been shared and feeling love turn jagged because it has nowhere adequate to go.
Still, I remain.
That sounds too noble. I do not mean it nobly.
I remain the way a nail remains in old wood. Bent, half-buried, refusing extraction mostly because extraction would hurt worse. I remain because the children are here. Because Christa is here. Because the people I love are not abstractions. Because joy, when it comes, still knows my name. Because anger has not finished with me. Because even despair, if I listen closely, is not the absence of love but love trapped under too much stone.
I stay.
Not because staying solves anything.
Not because pain becomes beautiful when endured.
Not because there is a lesson waiting at the bottom with clean hands.
I stay because leaving the life I love to the disease would be a final collaboration with it, and I am not ready to be that generous.
The truth is darker than I want it to be.
I am grateful, and gratitude is not enough.
I am loved, and love does not make the body less broken.
I am safe, and safety does not quiet the hum.
I am sad, and still capable of joy.
I am tired beyond the reach of the word tired.
I would take the pain from everyone I love if pain obeyed love.
It doesn’t.
So, I do the poorer thing. The smaller thing. The only thing.
I stay here.
In the pit. In the chair. In the house. In the wrecked, beloved body.
With them.
Still listening.
Still hurting.
Still not gone.
We can’t all walk away
I want to swallow it
The hum in the pit
As I’ve said with a few previous songs (three now, I think), this song has quite a lot of profanity seeing as I was sad and angry while drafting this one. So, again, if that bothers you or there are kids around it might be best to skip for now.
