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July 13, 2024

I’m Talking to the Man Wearing a T-Shirt That Says Everything Hurts because I Need to Tell You Something about My Marriage

Mitchell Nobis

You're holding a baby in the grocery store 

which suggests you have found some degree 

of love in this world which means you also 

already know that there are ways to mitigate 

the hurt, to ameliorate it maybe a tiny amount, 

but you also know that love itself is sometimes

willing to be a magnifying glass between 

the sun and yourself making everything hurt 

tenfold. Love can burn. Love is funny that way. 

But what do I know? 

I ask myself that a lot lately. 

What do I know.

 

Everything hurts. Some things feel good.

We move along either way. We learn that

what we’re supposed to find painful is

lightweight. The TV tells us to be crushed by 

a sophomore year breakup or a buzzer beater loss. 

Sure, we already agreed everything hurts,

but these pale   

to bombs, to rockets, to guns, to viruses

literal, metaphorical, to entire machines 

trying to grind humans into meal, trying to 

compost your cousins. 

 

So the thing is, there comes a point.

There comes a point when yeah you see

that everything hurts, but the small pains

are just the price of admission.

You need a ticket to see the beauty.

One hurt, please– 

I want in. 

 

One time almost fifteen years after we got married, in the middle of our hectic days running our kids here & there, running our screaming kids here & there, screaming and running our screaming kids here & there, my wife’s engagement ring broke. The stone is out there somewhere, but it’s not in the ring anymore. She thinks—the best guess, a logical deduction, but what do we know, mysteries exist—is that because ring settings can loosen over time the stone must have fallen out in the shower. We searched everywhere else, on hands and knees with flashlights in mouths combing the bedroom floor, the family minivan, the hallways & sidewalk joints between the two. So her best guess is it went down the shower drain which means this cultural symbol of our love is quite literally lost in the sewer system’s slurry. 

I proposed on a long weekend away.

With a poem, of all clichéd things.

A life since then. A family.

An embarrassment of graces.

She seemed worried by the loss of the gem—

everything hurts—but me? I had her still.

I still have her, thank the gods.

So yes, everything hurts, but 

be real

how much could losing a diamond,

how much could that really hurt

when I still have         ?

 

 

So,
then,
I like your shirt, man.
It’s right—everything hurts. You, me, everyone else bagging their bread, their milk, their eggs—we all knew that already. The cashier, watching us check ourselves out on beeping scanners, daydreaming about what hurts right now and maybe wondering where she’ll have to hunt for love when it turns out it’s just buried in the daily shit. It doesn’t need to shine to be there. Maybe burning, maybe hurting, maybe worried, but there, silent. Warm.

Mitchell Nobis is a teacher and writer who had stopped writing poems for a while. He would like to say this was for some worthwhile reason like he had picked up the art of making sushi or something cool, but really he mostly just felt sorry for himself. He had a hard time answering Who cares? in the face of writing pieces that would eventually land in yet another probably unwanted manuscript. He is lucky enough to have had his third manuscript picked up which is super cool, but he still had a hard time looking at a blank page. Then he saw a guy two rows over in the checkout line at the grocery store holding a baby and wearing a tee-shirt that says EVERYTHING HURTS. Mitchell is very aware that everything hurts. He has a medial meniscus tear from playing basketball a good 10 years longer than any well-balanced guy would do, so Mitchell saw that shirt and thought HELL YEAH IT DOES and the shirt became a muse. This is the first of Mitch's everything hurts poems to be picked up but the second or third one he wrote, which he shares with you in case he somehow gets famous and you need to know a useless factoid to win at bar trivia on Tuesday night and get that $40 gift card you can't use that night but can use any other night. The older he gets, the more aware he is that everything and everyone hurts and that the answer is love, of course, which we all already knew but have a mysteriously and inconceivably hard time acknowledging in daily life. Hang in there, buds. Hang in there. For more, see mitchnobis.com. You can find him at @MitchNobis on Bluesky, Twitter, and others, and his poetry collection Beginning to Sense is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in late 2025.