Week 47 - The Chain of Pain

The Chain of Pain

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Ramsey was bitter and jaded and a romantic and an optimist. He was all sorts of fucked up when it came to love and life and he loved and hated that. Sometimes he leaned more one way than the other, but that depended on the day and on the mood.

Ramsey was preoccupied with the concepts of love. He thought about it most every day. It didn’t matter if he had a particular girl in mind. It could be someone he saw once on the subway or it could be that one girl from that one time in college or it could be the relationship he was currently in. It didn’t matter. Love, the lack thereof, and all the failures in-between. He was a broken record, scratching over and over and over the same old itch.   

Why did love always fail? Did it have to? Always? Was it just him or was it everyone? Maybe he was a magnet. Or maybe he was always looking for perfection, or worrying so much about what could have been or might be that he always missed out on what could have actually worked. It was a terrible terrible set of circumstance.

Ramsey didn’t hold himself accountable. Not all the way anyway. He had a theory, and he was certainly a part of it, but he for sure wasn’t the catalyst or main reason for failure. At least not by his own assessment he wasn’t.

Ramsey blamed the past and the future and the interlinking locks that bound the two together. He blamed the bonds between us. He blamed the invisible chain... The Chain of Pain, as he called it. The whole world was connected by their past lovers and that was why things got so messed up.

Ramsey had a terrible superpower – not a superpower like a superhero superpower. He wasn’t about to fight crime or anything like that. That was part of what made it so terrible. The other awful part was that it was a fairly depressing and self-destructive superpower. Ramsey’s power was that every time he kissed a girl, he could see everyone they had ever been with…  Who they had dated, touched, loved, held… He saw everything. Everything. Or maybe it was all his imagination. But he didn’t think so. He thought for sure that he knew just exactly who what when where and why. He saw their chain of pain and could count every single last link. No matter how big or small the relationship, no matter how serious or trivial. He knew it, he saw it, he felt it. Over and over. He relived all of it.

It was a terrible burden. Terrible.