Bandage

Jessa sometimes wears bandages to work, to the grocery store, to her Weight Watchers meetings, to dates.

She almost never needs them, but she likes the look of them. Neat white gauze wrapped around her elbow. A smooth tan bandaid affixed to the heel of her palm. A butterfly closure sitting delicately on her cheekbone.

It's not the attention or sympathy that Jessa likes. Mostly people don't ask; strangers are too polite, and her coworkers have figured out that there are usually no injuries beneath the bandages. And she doesn't wear them to hide, or conceal. What Jessa likes is the ritual.

She dips her fingers into the clean white bowl of cotton balls, separating one piece of fluff from the rest.

Then she pours a little rubbing alcohol onto it, and she loves the feel of the swift coolness spreading through the ball, making it collapse into a soft pad.

She dabs the alcohol onto whatever is being bandaged, smearing a circle of evaporation, breathing the sharp clean vapor.

She either pulls a crisp paper wrapper apart and drops the curls into the trash, watching as they flutter on the way down, or she unwinds a length of gauze with small, deft turns of her wrists.

She places the bandage with care, setting the adhesive firmly against her skin, or tucking the ends of the woven cotton strip neatly under itself.

At the end of the day, the feel of the bandaid peeling slowly off her skin makes her arms and scalp erupt in goosebumps. When she unwraps the gauze from around her wrist, or ankle, or knee, the revealed limb feels small and free.

Allergies

My mother told me I didn't have allergies, but I am certain that I am allergic to dry dead grass and dry powder sunlight and dry blue sky, blue like the bottom of a drained pool. Some call it paradise, but the mountains make me itchy--or maybe they don't, but they are persistent and persistence is itchy. That may be why I've never had a girlfriend--much to my mother's chagrin--and it may be why I've never held a job for more than four months--take my word for it, allergies are not a good excuse to skip your shift--and it may be why I prefer rain and snow, especially snow, glittering like it's fake, cubic zirconia like they have in all the casinos here, but heavy and wet and concealing.

Revert/regress

When sick, I revert. Not to childhood, but to the latent small-mammal-huddling-in-the-woods that still lives somewhere in my genes.

I get the urge to burrow, to build warm humid dens of blankets and pillows. All I want, when my Eustachian tubes get itchy and my head feels like it's lined with flannel and my glands start to get tender and swollen, is to hide out from the universe, wait out the storm, curl up, cower, comfort. I just want to build a soft bubble, as much to protect others from my sickness as it is to hide inside. 

But I live out here in the plains at the feet of mountains, and the air is crisp and dry like a good cider, or a nice white wine if you like wine. It's hell on my raw nose, makes me aware of my bronchial tubes. I'm a human living in a human house and working a human job, and it's bad manners to listen to the internal little mammal.

I sit neatly on the couch with only one blanket, and drink tea, and dose myself with NyQuil, and accumulate a fine dusting of scrunched up tissues around me, and watch Netflix like the civilized animal I am.

Nocturnal Topography or Things That are on My Bed (Not Including Me)

Sheets and pillows of course, and a blanket that my grandma made for me when I graduated high school, and a blue nightgown balled up in the corner that my ex-boyfriend gave me which I pretended to love, but it's actually really itchy so I never wear it (except for laundry day), and my laptop which stays on while I sleep and beams bright white light into my dreams, and the Important American Novel that I am trying to read, and the romance novel with Fabio on the cover that I am actually reading, and the envelope my last gas bill came in and at least three pens and the sparkly clutch that fits either my wallet or my phone but not both, and down at the bottom a plate that used to have a sandwich on it which i ate in bed after work yesterday while watching Seinfeld, and my calendar open to three weeks from now because that's the time I want it to be.

So I would invite you to stay, but there isn't any room.

Notebook

How dare you lay
your notebook
next to me?
Open:
bright white paper eye
blank ink scribble tongue
Why shouldn't I look?
You dare me to look
is to know is
to know
you

Synesthesia

You associate colors with things that don't have color (or, sometimes, with things that don't even have shape, or form, or substance).

White with snow - but not how snow looks, how snow feels when it's just invisible sparkles in the air and small enough that, when you breathe in, the little shocks of cold hit the back of your nose and freeze the hairs inside

Red with the urgent and unexpected sudden-kid-need to pee

Orange with staying up all night to do something unpleasant: homework or cleaning or packing or throwing up the remains of the party because you're apparently too old to drink like that anymore and you can't just self-medicate with greasy food and be okay

Yellow with the crayon and powdery uncooked rice smell your kindergarten classroom had

Green with your frustration at the way cheap shiny fabrics snag on the tiny whorls of your fingers, when what you want is for your hands to glide smoothly and coolly across the surface

Blue with the limp warm feeling you get after stretching in bed on weekend mornings

Indigo with stickiness, and - separately - with guilt

Violet with the tingling moment of silence right after lightning flashes

Pink with how wearing sandals makes you aware of your toes

Black with the memory of burying your face in the silky patient neck of the dog you had as a kid, and with forgiveness

Rings

When he was stoned, Matt believed if he cut off the tip of his finger it wouldn't bleed. He would be able to cut through it with a butter knife and it would be like slicing a piece of cheese, and on the inside of the digit there wouldn't be muscles and nerves and veins, but instead it would be smooth and covered in concentric rings, like a tree. One for each year of life.

He could look at the rings and see that he was fat when he was 8, but impossibly skinny when he was 18, because one would be bigger than the other. The year he dropped out of high school would be slightly darker than the rest, and the 13th ring would have the faintest shade of green because that's when he started smoking pot. 

Matt wanted to know what his friend's rings would look like, how the events of their life left marks that could only be seen by them. He could never ask them though. They wouldn't take it seriously. They wouldn't care like he did.