What is Real?

What is real?

Pain.

Pain is real.

It wanders around these words.

And sinks in the shadows of my heart.

I can feel it sometimes:

In my body.

In its joints.

Creaking and craving attention.

In my thoughts it lingers and whispers

stories of the past and how I should have planted the tree in the sun instead of watering it so much in the dark.

It is there:

In my future.

When they leave.

Or I do.

Or we all do.

Its name is pain.

I have called it this.

I have brought it out and into the light.

I want to see this pain. I want to know it. Breathe its smoke and exhale it into the sky as an offering to God.

So that I may ask:

Why? Why this pain?

And so He may say:

"Because pain is real.

Pain is real.

But love," He'll say,

"Love is the ultimate reality."