Atmospheric Pressure

When I was 12 years old, I broke the radial bone in my left forearm. Pedaling my friend’s bike back to her garage, I wanted to ride it up her steep driveway. About half-way up the climb, I realized I didn’t have the strength to make it. I tried to dismount, but it was too late. I fell, my forearm crushed by the frame. It was just a sliver of a fracture. Because there was no outward show of injury, I got little sympathy for the excruciating pain when I tried to lift anything, even a pencil. But eventually the pain died down, and we all sort of forgot that I was ever even hurt.

“Oh, my bones are aching. It must be about to rain.” 

- Everybody’s grandpa, ever.

               Later I noticed an odd phenomenon: my arm could predict the weather. Sort of.  When a big snowstorm was arriving, or even just rain, my forearm would ache. Fun scientific fact: when a storm comes, there’s a drop in barometric pressure, which causes soft tissue and fluid to expand, especially around joints or old injuries—even ones that are entirely healed.

              I know what you’re thinking—“With a talent like that, why wouldn’t you drop out of school and become the world’s most interesting local weather person?” but here’s the other part: this ache is unpredictable. Sometimes a storm will arrive without any signal from the arm, and sometimes it will hurt with sunny skies the whole day long. But for the most part, it’s an unexpected change in atmospheric pressure that will cause this old pain to return. It’s not a sharp pain, or an agony in discomfort, it’s just… an ache.

Heartache feels similar to me. Immediately after the loss, people empathize with your pain—there’s a tangible, socially-expected, sympathetic response to “He’s gone.” Then enough time passes, and the cut, the wound, the crack-- even if it was only ever a fracture--heals. Eventually the oppressive, excruciating pain stops following you.  You can go about functioning with all your normal faculties. You can even be genuinely happy for your lost lover. And with every passing day, the pain dulls a little more until you feel confident in saying the break is no longer broken.

But every once in a while, there will be a change in atmospheric pressure. You’ll hear a song on the radio, or see his favorite something-or-other, remember an inside joke, or see a picture of him and his new family, or sometimes there’s no trigger at all. But you’ll suddenly feel a dull ache. Like a bruise that you didn’t know was there until someone poked it. I still ache with a sudden change in “weather,” and I don’t know if that experience will ever go away.

           
  But there’s power in memory. This ache means you hurt once. The break itself is evidence of an ambitious trip—maybe you didn’t have the momentum to make it all the way up the driveway, but the attempt isn’t something to belittle. There’s a piece of pride that should revel in the ache, because it’s proof that we're alive. That we're attempting to live.

“It is better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.” I vacillate between believing this quote and hating it. Written by Sir Alfred Tennyson, when feeling optimistic, it is the hope we bring to every new relationship. It is the balm that soothes the panic that if we end up muscling through a relationship, and fall, and get broken, we might ache for years into the future. It's the risk we take. And I believe we’re brave—maybe even noble for taking it. Because even after all the pain, and the remnant aches, I can’t say I wouldn’t have loved the people I lost.  

Would you?