Memory Squeeze

Memory Squeeze

a light sting

skin broken

some blood

a minor hurt

it will heal fast

a couple of showers

there’ll be no sign

no scab

not even a scar

a minor memory

that conjures a bigger memory

of the years

years ago

in another century

another country

where I was a cutter

a time when I made myself bleed

more than this

there was no need to squeeze

the blood flowed easily

I’m over that now

or so I thought

buried the memory

deep enough

yet when I pop a pimple

it comes back

then I had a fearful despair

of needing the proof of being ordinary

I no longer feel that need

but

when I squeeze

I’m forcing that memory out again

into my day today

I stop

wash my hands

wondering

why am I plucking

at that thread again

Part of my self-abuse history involves being a cutter – that is someone who deliberately cuts themselves in one way or the other. Burners are people who, you guessed it, deliberately burn themselves – sometimes with cigarettes. I didn’t recognize or label my behaviour as such at the time, so I didn’t seek any sort of help for it either. Good things I didn’t, as I’ve said before, if I got the help need then the help available would have killed me.

LGBTQ teens at that time could be legally institutionalized by their parents – once there they were chemically castrated or given shock-treatment or lobotomized. Sometimes I forget what I survived without really knowing the danger I was in – danger I only found out when I was well out of that danger. There wasn’t even conversion ‘therapy’ unless one counts the constant fear of been beaten up for smiling at the wrong time as conversion therapy.

The cutting started before I became a drunk and continued for awhile when I sobered up. It wasn’t a regular thing but it was often enough to be considered a thing.

I sometimes share about it in recovery but rarely talk about it otherwise. I’ve written another piece about it long ago. The memory of that behaviour can resurface now if I find myself worrying the occasional pimple on my arm or if I scratch an itch too much. As the poems ends I check my action to make sure its just an itch & not some stress I’m acting out on. Usually it’s a thoughtless nervous action that alerts me to the fact that I am nervous.

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