Scabs are romantic

I find scabs romantic, not in the sense of love, but in the old definition of romantic, as in marvelous. Fantastic. Unsettling. Lovely.

I fell outside a bar (not because I was drunk, because a curb decided to catch my foot. I promise I am man enough to admit if I was that sloppily drunk. But I was like one watered-down Cosmo in) and cut my knee deep enough to see pink. I remember hopping up on a car right afterwards to inspect it. I held the wrist of the current guy I was torturing with my flirting, balancing so I could better peer at the wound. He told me he had done surgery before. He showed me a photo of a mans leg cut open. I wasn’t phased, so maybe I was a little drunk? Anyways, it was a nasty cut.

Nobody had a bandaid and it was a Sunday night, so my leg stayed breathing til eleven the next morning. Blood rolled down my leg as I kissed this guy at two that morning. My leg was oozing as I laughed into his mouth.

Now I have a scab forming. The dirt that was lodged inside of me is being pushed upward, rejected. A big black spot is on the side, hard as a rock. It makes me sick to look at, with both disgust and longing. It is so animal to want to pull off a scab, no? Its like how I long to touch my friends’ hair. I demand to show my monkey side.

Back to romance:

Something about the way the rot is being rejected so that the new skin might form is very sweet to me. Expelling all the vulgar excess, the grey-green goop that forms along the sides and flakes off once air hits it. How one day it will all be swept up, tucked into a neat little scar. Skin is magical. Skin is romance.

To describe it to you, it is in the very center of my kneecap. In an almost rosebud shape, the skin around it is healing in white petals, fading into the pale of my skin. Where the wound is deepest, the color is a light red and a brownish green. As the layers proceed upwards, the skin gets greener. There is a soft scab. It has just begun to form. Then there is my favorite section, the hard black scab. It is in almost a heart shape. Like it demanded me to love it. To adore its painful presence. A little gift amongst the occasional agony!

So I suppose scabs can also be romantic in the modern sense, as well. The desire to touch them, to bother something when the only outcome can be temporary satisfaction paired with permanent damage… that is incredibly romantic as well. Love is practically self harm, at a certain point. A constant picking. An obsessive compulsion.

It’s almost one am. I have much to think about.