Blood: red and velvety, its iron stench all over my fingers. Somehow, in my youth, I found it socially acceptable to preen my clothing and myself until the point of hurt. Smooth my sweater with my hands, comb my fingers through my hair, pick the loose skin off of my lips until they bled, and bled, and bled.
“I’ll pay for our coffees — seriously, they’re gift cards from my Grandma. I have money. If you pay, I’ll be mad,” I say. There is a certain guilt that surrounds being paid for, like I have to make my presence worth the money. Male Coworker scrunches his nose. I do not particularly care if I’ve made him angry. I am the one with the car.
The hail outside pounds on the Starbucks’s rooftop.
“Alright,” he says, and orders something without caffeine.
He looks at me while we wait for the barista. I snap my gaze in another direction. When we do get our drinks — and it does not take long — we sit facing a floor-to-ceiling window. Thank goodness! The lack of eye contact is comforting. Ice plummets from the sky; this is much more interesting than him, anyway. My boots slip back and forth over the chair’s stretcher. Squeak!
The movement of the picking in question was always easy enough. All it took was a forefinger, a thumb, and long nails on both. Pick! Rip! Blood.
Fingernails are in the shape of a crescent moon. So, after picking, there was a crescent shape carved in my nail polish. I surmised that even if there were a bloody mess, my mouth felt smooth, so it must have been a success; it was damp, and smooth, and swollen from the assault.
When I was six years old, my mother commanded me to end this awful habit. Five years later at six in the morning, smack-dab in the middle of July, I sat on an air mattress in my Grandmother’s home in California and I told myself I would stop picking. What did I look like when I smiled? Did I smile in blood? There could be no other possibilities. I knew that when I laughed my skin would, without question, break into blood.
“I got into the University of Washington a couple of years ago, when I was your age,” Male Coworker tells me.
“A couple of years ago you still would have been older than me,” I remind him.
“Well, anyway — my mother made me go back to Japan and become a monk. Austerity is valuable, and all that. They made us run every morning, and one day, my lungs burst. Nobody believed me.” Male Coworker likes to talk, but he wants to hear about me too. There is nothing to tell. Rather, there is nothing particularly interesting about me that he should know or that I would be willing to tell.
“I don’t have friends, so that’s why I was hoping to talk,” I say. I hope this satisfies him. “Can we leave?”
His face scrunches up. “Are you hungry? Because I’m hungry.”
“No, I’m not hungry,” I say, “and I have to get home soon, actually. I don’t like driving in the dark.”
“Don’t worry,” Male Coworker says. “There’s a McDonald’s on the way to my house.”
People sometimes asked questions.
Did someone hit you? Do you need a napkin? Do you need to go to the nurse’s office?
Normalcy always demanded explanation.
No, I said, no, and no. There are no bandages for this type of hurt. It heals into stiffness eventually anyway.
Me picking my skin and bleeding was within the routine of regularity. It occurred to me — over many years, not in any single instance — that I was not invisible. People looked at me and saw something made of flesh that can talk and move and cry.
I drive myself and Male Coworker to McDonald’s.
We sit across from each other. This is less than preferable (as I am now obligated to look at him and he will look at me). The sky is erring on darkness anyway, between a smear of orange and purple. He orders an expanse of fries and burgers and what I believe are Chicken McNuggets.
“You’re going to eat all of this?” I ask.
“What?” He yanks his shoulders up into a shrug and says, “I thought you were hungry.”
“I said I wasn’t.”
I lean back into the bright red McDonald’s booth. How do they get the glitter underneath the plastic? I wonder. The red cushion first, and then the glitter, and then a huge plastic sheet? That must be it. Male Coworker’s gaze has been on me for a couple of minutes but I pretend not to notice, pressing my fingers into the booth cushion. Squish.
I suppose at some point in my life I could have dismissed the anxiety that people could see me. That I exist. Then, I could move with some fluidity. I could not accept this, though, and from that point forward I was stiff.
Stiffness is alienation. My own movements are not unlike a tree bristling in a windstorm, that sometime during the act of motion will be upended by the roots and topple somewhere on the ground. I will rot. Certain other people will find me eventually. They will pick my twigs and branches out of the wreck, out of flies and maggots and worms, and I will tell them this happened all because someone looked at me.
“I’d like to have dinner at your house sometime,” he says.
“Nuh-uh. You wouldn’t like my brother. You know how adolescent angst is.”
“What? No problem. I’ll just put my hand on his knee and say, I’m not straight. That’ll scare him up a bit.” He laughs.
I snatch a napkin from napkin holder in front of me, and behind it, seize the skin on my mouth between the nails of my pointer finger and thumb. Pick! Rip! What the hell? What am I supposed to say?
If I didn’t stop ripping, I would have retched up my Starbucks and that would not have been good for myself, for Male Coworker, or the McDonald’s staff. I sink into the booth, box my shoulders, and go still and stiff. Does he notice the gash on my mouth? It is like I am a little kid again; will that be deterring enough? Should I tell him the truth? If I were courteous, I would say:
“It all began in the days of yore, when I was taken from my mother’s womb, covered in blood and wailing. My cries were incomprehensible then, but if one could speak a baby’s unsophisticated language, they could hear clearly the repeating phrase: ‘I’m a lesbian! I’m a lesbian!’ though this would grow apparent in the years to come.”
But I do not say it.
No, the truth: all human beings are made of fluid. A sack of meat filled with blood and held up by bones. I, in particular, do not like men of any character or stature or background and this does not, in fact, exclude him. My abnormalities always demand explanation.
Pick! Rip! It stings. Blood, to purify his utterance. Blood, the fluid that would free me finally from offering some hackneyed justification. My acquaintances, later, would call me “picky”, but right now I wish anxiously to be gone from the McDonald’s floating in the darkness of Kent, Washington.