Nails & Knuckles

In heroin addicts, I had seen the debasement that comes from the loss of free will and enslavement to what amounts to an idea: permanent pleasure, numbness, and the avoidance of pain. But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior.

“Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic” by Sam Quinones

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Dear Alex,

I have just awoken to the shock of a distant memory: the face of my bullies.

The two girls wore the same look of one face in my early primary school years. Not a chilled or cutting look. It was their stare unified in dance. Dancing eyes in search for me.

My first and youngest bully in kindergarten was more polished in purpose. The other in another niche of time, greeting me with projectile spit on my face in our morning walks to school, could not measure up to the pristine first pair of dancing eyes on me.

I saw her every morning in the school bus. I was about 6, she 7. The age gap mattered because it gave her the benefit of force in fist and foot hurling with precision towards me. After our year-long animated mornings on the bus, it all stopped at the crack of her stare in a dance we had begun to master. I had grown bigger in frame, broader in rage to bear in return my fingernails and knuckles on her face after hers on mine.

My mom observed the aftermath in violet arcs and frays around my eyes and neck. I denied the encounter as one in series, never having reported them to anyone before the finale. So mom asked about the origin of the marks on my skin. I was not aware of them, not when I had left the bus before the school bell rang nor after school when mom picked me up. Visible wounds turn sheer to the one in denial but raving still in color.

I am not sure why the remote image of a close-up stare from my early childhood has haunted me in the middle of this night. I have long deserted the memory. I have no reason or impulse to retrieve it.

And maybe in the least expected likelihood of recall, it came brimming out of me - the incident, the history, the perilous interlude when things feel safe and supple. When skin and masks are safeguards and supplements of civility. When what is behind and inside seems sweeter than the impulse and reason for questioning the dormant viral attacks unnoticed, unimagined beyond the look and waltz of denial.

Pain can be good if you can feel it to let something good out of it.

Yours, Kate