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Pain is like heat. It sounds contrived and cliché, but I know that it's true. When the air is really hot, the heat envelops your entire body and makes it hard for you to breathe. It's exactly the same for pain. When something hurts, your initial reaction is to pull away from the source as fast as you can. Same for heat. And they each spread and stay with you as a memory. Sometimes, you're scarred.

Every kind of pain is the same. From the smallest paper cut to the devastation you'll feel when you're forced to watch the people that you've loved the most die. There are barely any varying degrees. Pain is pain however you look at it and even if it's insignificant, it still hurts and that's all that matters. It depends only on the moment.

We watched them die and there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it. We could only stand there, feet glued to the ground, terror written all over our faces.

I haven't been able to talk about it since then. Neither of us has, but one look at each other's face and the entire scene unfolds again and again. I know that we both need to get past it, attempt to move on with our lives or some such trite crap that I would probably hear from my therapist if I was ever able to talk to her about anything. But we can't do that either.

Yes, I am mature enough to know that I need help. But not so mature that I can actually face that help head on. So, for ages, I've been paying this woman a full night's tips to sit silently in her office and listen to her babble on about denial. And when I walk out of her office, I go right to the secretary and make another appointment.

And I doubt that I'll say anything during that one either.

For a while, I think we both believed that it was our fault, that we could have done something to prevent what happened. Or, maybe, we thought we should have gone down with them.

I don't believe that anymore, at least not usually. I've traveled through all of the prescribed stages of my grief and found myself right back at the denial. But it can't be denial if I know it is, right?

And every night when I lie down in the bed I've slept in since I was a child, the same bed I am so afraid to ever leave, I see it all happen again in my dreams. Sometimes in slow motion, sometimes as fast as it actually happened. Usually, I wake up screaming.

They're used to it by now. My mother used to run into my room and hold me while I sobbed and stay with me until I fell asleep. These days, I just sit in my bed for an hour or so until the shaking wears off and I know I can sleep again. Until the next time.

They'll never understand -- they didn't have to see it all play out in front of them. They didn't have to hear it in their ears and in the deepest bits of their brains and feel every single moment of it.

So little has been said about it. The truth was covered by faked evidence and lies that we both helped to create in the stressed hours right after it happened. How we pulled it together, I still don't know. I guess we were just running on auto-pilot and trying to cover everyone's asses. It wouldn't have mattered. They were dead.

Nothing has really mattered since.

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