Itch

I tried stringing up lights in my window the other day.

They were just like the ones in my old apartment.

I figured it would be nice to have a little homage to my old home.

A little normalcy.

I could memorialize at least one thing from my old life that, in a matter of months, went completely helter-skelter.

Everything changed for me over the last two years.

Cats, cities, cars, and complete and utter worldwide chaos, quite frankly.

None of the above is how it once was.

And I liked everything exactly how it once was.

I liked it very, very much.

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My new lights fell.

They hung for about three minutes before dropping onto the windowsill and shattering into a hundred little pieces.

They seemed to all hit at once.

They did not bring the hooks down with them, and, somehow, they still fell.

They splintered all over the carpet below.

And I…

I could not stop laughing.

That kind of poetry rarely just drops out of the sky like that.

And into your hands.

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It has taken days to clean it up.

My hands seemed to have attracted every minuscule shard.

The ones so little they look like glitter on your skin.

And they hurt.

Not badly, no.

They just stung a bit.

Even after I had carefully removed them all from my palms - and the carpet, for that matter - they left this feeling I had been dealing with for months, even though that feeling has been purely psychological.

It bugged me for so long because I had not been able to identify it.

That phantom sensation of sticky sharp glass in my skin.

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I found myself scratching at my thoughts, raking my nails over the tiny, healed cuts left over from the past year.

They are healed now.

More and more of them are scarring over every day.

The scratching is rare, because most of my wounds have already mended, having lost their scabs and bruises long ago.

And still these tiny, persistent slivers of glass in my skin can be so…

Irritating.

I have been in the limbo between fully healed and freshly hurt for months, followed by that specific irritation I’m talking about which the English language, as far as I know, has not caught up to yet.

I think the closest word is actually “itch”.

Can a soul - itch?

It feels like I absentmindedly scratch at whatever wounds have found me and occasionally set myself back by reopening the damn things.

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They sting every time.

They burn.

I keep going back in for more.

I have to -

I have to pick at them.

I have to succumb to that need.

The more I am healed, the weaker I am.

The more I am compelled to look for glass leftover in my hand.

I hunt for them over and over again, trying to find what is causing this itch.

I run my fingers over my skin again and again.

.

But I can’t find anything.

It's over!

There is nothing more to heal.

And yet... I keep looking for more.

And if I find something - just one thing - that seems to itch, I’ll pick at it until it becomes an entirely different wound that I have to - somehow- allow to heal with the others.

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Why...?

What even is that, evolutionarily speaking?

It doesn’t make any sense.

It’s been driving me batshit.

I had to do a bit of research, of course.

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According to the good people of woundcaresociety.org, we scratch our physical wounds for good reason.

Apparently, the body “promotes reaction from your hands to sweep the disturbing agent away from the wound.”

They say the itchiness is an “inevitable” part of “maturation” and “remodeling''.

Okay that’s great.

But I... I don't...

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Why is the temptation to scratch so inevitable?

Why do we feel compelled to interrupt our own healing, when the disturbing agent has long been removed?

Why does proof that we are, in fact, healing, pester and plague us?

I’m quite familiar with that fact, psychologically speaking, we humans like to sabotage ourselves on occasion.

We are all gluttons for punishment in one way or another.

But why do we pull that punishment out of thin air?

Why do we make this harder for ourselves?

Why do we sabotage our own progress?

Why do we pick at old wounds?

Why do we religiously rake our nails over something that we know needs to be left alone?

What is that?

Why do we constantly turn over every last choice we make like a worry stone, not accepting that we will not suddenly find a new answer on the other side?

Why do we dwell on what could have been?

Why do we make it so punishing?

Why do we make it so exponentially worse?

Why do we pick -

And pick -

And pick -

Until what could have been a nick becomes a gash?

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I guess you can’t brush anything away when there is no physical evidence of it anymore.

But, for whatever God-forsaken reason, the sensation remains.

It lingers well past its welcome.

If you give into the “inevitable” temptation to pick at it, you have to start over.

From scratch.

Isn’t that just… evil.

Both the concept and the pun.

All of this is actually evil.

Because I actually do know why I do this.

And it's never stopped me.

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We all have different reasons for picking at an old wound.

Mine is this:

The sooner it heals, the sooner it’s over.

The sooner a life I carefully curated is over.

The sooner the family car becomes scrap metal.

The sooner my friends become old friends.

The sooner my beloved cat is a box on a shelf.

The sooner the debt I accrued while trying to save him is just a negative mark on a bank statement and no longer a hail Mary pass.

The sooner I have to learn to say, “I did what I could”.

The sooner there is nothing more I could have possibly done.

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The truly shitty part of healing is that you genuinely have to let yourself to do it.

You have to allow it.

And you have to keep letting yourself to do it every day.

Letting go - and letting those wounds heal - requires your own permission.

It requires your consent to stop trying to answer unanswerable questions.

What if I forget how much it hurt me?

What if I forget how scared I was?

What if I never make sense of any of it?

What if I move on without knowing the whole story?

What if I am doomed to repeat it all the second I consider this truly over?

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I have volumes and volumes of “what ifs”.

And their itching keeps me awake at night.

The only balm I have is knowing that none of this is new to me.

Somehow, this will all heal as it has healed before - gradually.

I will wake up one day to find that none of it itches anymore.

They will stop itching long before I even realize it.

It heals.

I... heal.

I turn those scars into stories to tell during pillow-talk or a haircut.

Because that’s all this mayhem will be, in the end - a story.

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What is this nonsense for other than that?

I really and truly have no idea.

I know that we excel at turning nicks into gashes when we are alone.

I know that’s when it all itches the most.

I know it’s easiest to get carried away when you have no one to stop you.

I know how much it hurts to not be alone and still have no one to stop you.

I know that not everyone is able to, and that not everyone knows how.

They have their own problems, and their hands are just as busy as yours.

Or maybe they hide their hands in their pockets.

Or maybe they pick in the dark.

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The itch remains.

And yet some of us are in the business of healing.

We have made an art out of picking up the pieces.

We relish the task of keeping our hands busy.

We make disco ball earrings out of those pesky shards.

We show a professional how our hands are doing every Tuesday at 7.

We study ways to make food taste gorgeous.

We do drugs and frolic in the woods.

We learn how to run 26.2 miles with minimal vomiting.

We take medication that lets us feel human again.

We belt "Vienna" in the shower at 8am, black coffee in hand.

We dance in our kitchens with our new, very cute cats.

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We write.