Heavy (Icarus Remix) - Bow Anderson

I’ve never been physically punched in the gut before.

Whenever I saw it happen in movies or TV shows it looked like it was a special kind of pain.

Getting punched in the face looked bad too. Watching the fist hit the face, hearing it connect, and seeing the blood. But getting punched in the gut looked different. It was this imperceptible kind of pain.

There’s not a lot of sound involved. And you don’t see any blood. All you see is the look of pain on their face. But what made a punch in the gut look different was how it seemed to change time. How it made a person freeze. How it made them slowly curl into a ball. Trying to futilely, protect what just got injured.

Sometimes they would drop to their knees. Sometimes they would fall to the side. Sometimes they would wince. Sometimes they couldn’t muster a sound. But their faces would always seem to go someplace else. Like they were escaping the pain or going deeper into it.

I’ve never been physically punched in the gut before.

But I wonder if it feels like this.

Because it looks like a special kind of pain.