Free Write 15: Pain

I cut myself last night, messing around with a Y peeler, because I bought one, because I wanted to make roasted potatoes because I love potatoes but I hate peeling them, and I figured, a Y peeler is safe because I won’t have to worry about cutting myself, like I often did with a knife whenever I was cutting potatoes, or tomatoes, or butternut squash or sharing carrots.  Perhaps my knives have gotten dull but I’ve never cut myself once, ever and then while I was in the midst of listening to Keyshia Cole I put my thumb wide open.  Like, there is blood everywhere, my red potatoes died pink, pink smeared into the water.  I am so accident prone with things that are supposed to be safe for me, things that are good for me.  I fell down while running a few weeks ago, all in the middle of trying to focus, trying to breathe, trying to envision how great I’ll look when there’ll be a lot less of me, but no, I fall and luckily it’s so early in the morning that no one else sees me.  So now I have scars, sublte ones on my knees to match the scars I got while hiking in Utah, and I ate coming downhill, right next to the scar I received while rollerskating in grade school and I fell down and ate it too.  I have other scars on my knees from a shaving accident gone wrong; taking things out of the over and burning myself; times when I’ve scratched too much and there wasn’t enough cocoa butter or fading cream in the world to get rid of them, but they are still there.  I wish that I had used more free time doing other things, although no of these scars burned until I put peroxide on them.  Take a lesson from dad:  always use peroxide because it brought air to the cut, helped it heal faster.  I wish I had heeded this lesson long ago.  I keep doing the same things that I know could bring me pain but I am always surprised, always shocked but the gush that peroxide can bring.  But I need otherwise my scars won’t heal as quickly.  It needs to be handy in my life.

 

But what about those other scars, that other pain?  The pshyical pain used to not bother me:  just the evidence, but now the emotional pain bugs me even more.  Those are scars that don’t heal and there’s no peroxide to the heart that I can take.  I don’t know how to let those scars heal, let that pain heal because when it raises to the top it hurts and when I bury it, it hurts and the only way to really let it go to have some distance, from space, and even in that space I have to be conscious to not let ot go and raise to the top where it wants to.  Sometimes I just want someone to cook for, talk to, someone who will hold me…and just I feel ashamed for having such trite desires that no one will seem to fulfill.  There’s also pain in wondering if I will ever be happy being with someone and if I can only be happy alone, can I be okay with it?  Can I laugh just as I did when I fell while running or hiking or rollerblading?  Why can’t I find the beauty of the pink, the emotional pain or rejected love just as I can when my blood gets on potatoes, perhaps because I can wash it, I have a solution so I know that pain is temporary and it’ll only leave a scar that I can later on show to friends and family and laugh about this one time when I blah blah blah, and how I got through it because I know what I was doing.  I know who I am in those moments.