Never Actually Broke the Skin

When my mom asked me if I had ever self-harmed, about a decade after I had, I told her yes. With a caveat. I had never actually broken the skin.

I did not give her every detail, about how it would happen at night, as I lay on my back, unsleeping, so that the tears would drip from the edges of my eyes, along the cavern of my ear, down my neck, and into the pillow. This, somehow, felt more secret than if I had sat upright and let them flow down my cheeks into the gnawed and yellowed neckline of my father’s bright pink basketball t-shirt. I did not tell her about how it began with taking my heels to my forearms and rubbing and rubbing and rubbing, the friction upsettingly and rationally warm. I did not tell her how, during the day, I would take red pen and tiger-stripe my arms. That’s what I told my friends I was doing when, on the schoolbus, they saw the ink, asked why, and told me it was insensitive to people who self-harmed. I did not tell her that I apologized to them.

What I did tell her was that rather than take a pair of scissors or a razor blade or a knife (I considered them all) to my skin, I used the nails she always nagged me to cut to claw at my arms. The pain appeared as beds of pink and white flower petals blooming against my arms. Night after night I would tear up and plant these not quite bloody gardens that would strategically close their buds before morning.

I assured her it never broke the skin.

When she asked me why people do such a thing as cutting or not-quite-cutting, I told her I could only explain to her my why.

“When Dad died, I was only 12. I wasn’t old enough to understand that kind of grief, and so inside I was filled with what felt like an illogical pain. When I would scratch my arms, it was pain that made sense, and it made me feel better about the pain that didn’t make sense.”

It had taken us a decade to get to this sort of honesty, and that was my choice. I had given her the story in breadcrumbs. Four years after, I had told her I had been depressed. A year later, suicidal. Eight years, that I was depressed again, this time while it was still happening. Ten years, I told her I hurt myself, but only a little. It’s okay, Mom, I’m fine now. Don't worry, I never actually broke the skin.

Flash Issue 6