You have taken a blade to your skin so many times you do not know the number, just that it will be ten years in August on an uncertain date since the first occasion, and is, as you sit, six months since the last.
(It might be less.)
Maybe you should have started counting back at the start, but it is too late now. Too late, except to know that of all the times and there may be 100 with nicks and scratches over those ten years, of them all only one scarred.
6 January 2016, you think. Razor-blade, driven into your left arm in a fit of rage.
The blood made your hands tremble.
(Maybe that was the rage, too.)
A small ridge of scar tissue, invisible to all except you who knows it is there, where to look.
The mark of what you were, once, and may be again.
(You are too old to think it will never happen again.)
SM Colgan (she/her) is a bi writer living somewhere in Ireland. Her work focuses on emotion, history, sexuality, and relationships, romantic and otherwise. She writes to understand people who are and have been, and to ease the yearning in her heart. Her first prose pieces are forthcoming from Emerge Literary Journal and Stone of Madness Press. Twitter: @burnpyregorse.
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