Pleasure Of A Scar

The day after I got back to Boise and had driven and walked all over town - remembering and daydreaming until the wee hours -  I walked into my room, shut the door, climbed into bed, and cried until I didn’t feel explosive anymore. Being at school, though a mental battle, was safe from confronting my pain. I had been home a total of 10 days since the beginning of college, mainly as a result of avoiding things: family confrontations, sour memories, people from high school. I knew the boy who broke my heart, twice, had moved back home. I knew that it was time to “deal with my issues.”

With the necessity to create on the agenda for being home, I crawled out from under the blankets and pulled everything out, waiting for an image to float into my brain. I could feel my skin drying and itching as the mountain air leeched the Florida humidity out. I scratched my entire body, watching dead skin fall on the carpet, and irritated lines spring up, marking where I had been. It reminded me of the darker times when I would keep a push pin in my pocket in high school and dig it into the lining of my pocket to scrape my hip when I would spiral at school. The pain, though sharp and piercing, was tolerable enough to be undetectable - but when I would shower or disrobe, the proof was there for me to see. 

I grabbed a bottle of lotion and commanded myself to be kind to myself. The areas that had been scratched stung with irritation and glowed red with less permanence but the same guilty pleasure of the push pin scratches from years before. In this piece, the figure is scratching her neck, and blanketed in a grid of red dots. Digging for an itch that can’t just be scratched and demanding that she sit in the discomfort until it fades with time.