Aδ and C neurons travel the spinothalamic tract to transmit pain and temperature from body to brain. Each packet of pain undulates through the fibres until it arrives to the brain.

Aδ fibres are insulated. Rubber on a copper wire. The insulation allows the electric signal to travel quickly. Because of this speed, Aδ signals registers as a sharp pain. C fibres are not insulated. They transmit signals slower. Pain from the C fibres registers as dull pain. When this pain signal reaches the cortices of your brain it cascades into the corona radiata (physician phrase for radiating crown). It cascades like a dropped stone in a still pond.

Somewhere in these cascading ripples I feel pain.

I know the pain of a hot stove. I know it deep in my spinal cord. The neurologists tell me not to touch a hot stove.

But what about the pain from a fractured future? The pain I feel when you leave. When my expectations rust under rainclouds. Rainclouds stuffed with stories that now fall in the sky of my mind. A mind that is now a place pregnant with pain. The inflamed womb where jagged thoughts gestate when I am in line. Or on the train. Or thinking about you.

I didn’t touch a hot stove. But everything feels like a dull ache. If you hooked my spinothalamic tract to an electrical detector would it impress? Is this pain going up or down? I feel it in the thickness of my arms, my fingers, my toes, my legs. Something, someone, somehow nudges at my Aδ and C fibres.

The neurologists would have me believe that there is also a DESCENDING pain pathway. The DESCENDING pain pathway helps to modulate pain. Located in the Periaqueductal Gray Matter (PGM) are centres of pain modulation. Peri-peri Aqueduct Doesn’t Matter (PADM). Maybe the PADM turns on like a fast-food fluorescent sign when I accept pain. Like when I am in a cold shower. Pain is here when shower-drops fall like bullets. Yet I know I am safe. I stay in this cold coffin a while longer because I step out feeling alive. Refreshed. Open heart, open breath, open veins.  

Why is that pain (the pain of a cold shower) different to this pain (the pain of you/expectations/losing/love/not love/helplessness)? Maybe it is different when I know I can turn pain off with a shower knob. Maybe the Periaqueductal Gray Matter (PAG) turns on when I seek God in the cold.

God in the cold. In the ripples of a dropped stone in a still pond. If you took a snapshot of the ripples in my mind (rippling in my corona radiata and rippling from my swollen eyelids), you may catch a glimpse of perspective pain modulation. Whispers trying to meld truth from the broken edges of a fractured future:

“Things change. Things change. Things change. This won’t change. Things change. I should change. I should change things. Nothing changes. Things change…”