by Jessie Jen
The itch is somewhere deep inside. I like to imagine it’s a living creature that needs air, that absorbs the oxygen in my blood and releases little burps of gas that drift and drift to just beneath the surface, dotting my fingers with little blister-like bubbles. They ooze clear liquid when I pop them the way one would pimples, or when I rip off enough flesh that I’ve dug a crater in my palm. Google calls it dyshidrotic eczema—the images online and the condition of my hands seem to agree with each other.
I look at my hands and a chunk of my palm is cracked and split like an overripe fruit about to burst. I pry the wound apart, widening the canyon. I watch the connective tissue snap like fraying rope. It stings. Sometimes it bleeds. I think to myself—I’m alive, still.
**
To have lived dispassionately is to not have lived at all. I thought this to myself sometime in March at seventeen, when drafting my college application essays. Laying in my bed, sinking into the memory foam, I stared at my ceiling, at the stars beyond that I knew were there but could not see. I wondered why nothing in our reality seemed appealing enough to enrapture my soul. I thought about all the media I’ve consumed about love and freedom and passion and devotion, whether to something or someone, and how nice that must be. I, who had no such inclinations towards anything, waited for love of whatever kind to save me from an aimless stagnation.
**
My mother has told me many times that I’ve had bad skin since I was a child. I remember this. My skin rashes easily, scars easily. I had rough patches and purplish discoloration in the bends of my elbows and the back of my knees. Sometimes my thighs would flare up, other times my face would swell. At the doctor’s, I’d be prescribed medicinal ointments I still don’t know the names of, which my mother applied for me each night. I hated the oiliness of it—it rubbed off on the fabrics of my clothes and bedsheets.
I’ve seen multiple doctors for it: some in America, some on summer trips to visit family in Taiwan. All of them prescribed me some kind of ointment. I didn’t use them, and I still don’t, but when my mother asks me on my calls home, “Nǐ yǒu zài cā yào ma?” essentially asking if I’m taking my medicine (or in this case, applying it topically), I say yes. This is an old habit. A digital, cross-country telephoned reenactment of the constant nagging in my childhood that often went like this:
“Mei mei, are you applying your medicine?” my mother would ask, grabbing my arms to inspect the patches of eczema that show no signs of recovery, as if she’s checking to make sure I did my homework.
“Yes,” I’d insist, yanking my arm back. “They just don’t work.”
My parents would then take me to the doctor on my next annual checkup. They tell him in Chinese, “Her skin is acting up again.”
My doctor will sigh, go through the standard procedures. “Are you really using the medicine?” he asks me, skeptical. He asks this almost every time.
My parents look at me expectantly for an answer. I nod and say yes, though it is a blatant lie.
“She says it’s no use,” my mother tells my doctor. I know he’s fed up with this constant back and forth, just as I am.
“You have to use it consistently,” he says. Then he says he’ll prescribe it again if it’s running low, explains what it does and how to use it and when to use it. He says all this in Chinese, so I don’t understand a lick of it, nor do I particularly care. I’m fluent in Chinese, but not in medicinal terms, so I don’t use what I’m prescribed because I don’t know what each tube does or when to use it. I don’t admit this to my parents, because I think they expect me to retain what the doctor told me. They scold me for not using the ointments, and would probably scold me more if I said I don’t know how. I’m too lazy to deal with that, so I guess and start using them randomly.
Eventually I give up and stop trying altogether. My skin will get better on its own, or it won’t. The days pass anyway.
**
Around the time I reluctantly admitted I might be aromantic, my eczema had finally settled on staying with my hands, where it’s sat in continuous flux between severe and mild for the past three or four years. My fingers were swollen to a visible degree. Speckled by small blisters of dyshidrotic eczema, they were constantly itchy and sticky from the oozing pus. I wrapped them in tissue and binded them with medical tape. I ran my hands under scalding water until the itch gave way to relieving burn. I gnawed at my fingers like a dog with a bone when my nails couldn’t scratch hard enough.
That time was the worst it’s ever been, coinciding with the time I grappled with the notion that love, at least the romantic kind, was something not within my reach. It was a cruel joke, I thought, that this was how things unravelled.
Because isn’t love as we know it the core of the human condition? I felt myself robbed, not because I desired a grand romance or felt I needed a companion to be complete, but because I had now lost a dimension of the human experience, one often touted as the highlight of a person’s life. I, who clung to the hope that love would diverge me from the dispassionate life I had thus lived; I, who had cared for little but the notion of caring deeply for something, someday, did not get to feel the kind of love that is most central in our society.
There is certain behavior between individuals reserved for the experience of romance, and such behavior is meant to dominate a large portion of your life. Dating, marriage, having children or building a family: such things stem from our expectations of romantic love and human desire for companionship. To be alone is to be different—to be loveless is to be inhuman.
Of course this statement is not entirely true, but at seventeen I didn’t know love, and I felt that I would never. And if I didn’t know what love felt like, how could I say I ever loved anything, regardless of what it was? And if I was loveless, perhaps I wasn’t even human any longer.
So I denied it, of course. I convinced myself I hadn’t met the right people or encountered the right thing, that someone or something was out there in this great big world that I would fall in love with, that I could say with my whole heart meant more to me than anything else. The capacity had to be somewhere inside of me. Somewhere, beneath the raw tissue exposed by my ruthless scratching, beneath the matrix of white lines like layers and layers of cobwebs over peach colored flesh that composed my physical being.
**
Up and down my shins and littered across my arms are spots of hyperpigmentation that are results from a scab being picked over and over again, though they’ve slowly faded over the years. As a child, I would wait for them to grow back so I could peel it off again and eat it. I bite off the skin that lines the insides of my cheeks. Sometimes I bite down hard on my tongue with the intent to sever it. I lick at the blood leaking from wounds I’ve scratched open. When I used to bite my nails I would chew them into bits and bite at my cuticles. In boredom I start nipping at the center tubercle of my upper lip—catching it between my teeth in such a way that the thin layer of skin rips clean off like gift wrap. All this to say I have a complicated history with autocannibalism.
I have no explanation for it. I’ve never cared enough to need one. And I’ve done it for so long that it doesn’t register as gross to me anymore. Most of the time, it’s subconscious. Some chunk of my skin will scratch off and before I know it I’ve brought it toward my mouth. It takes a conscious decision to toss it away. Any upturned, dead piece of skin is subjected to this.
I found no issue with it because it’s my flesh and blood. My body made it, so I’m ingesting something that’s already been me. I’m merely reclaiming a product of my own being. Maybe I imagine that eating a part of myself will help me understand the composition of my being. Whatever the reason, I don’t really care.
**
I think part of me doesn’t want my eczema to get better. There’s logical reasoning as to why I never apply my medicine faithfully—the practical impossibility of doing anything with ointment-covered hands without leaving residue everywhere or being greatly uncomfortable being the most glaring issue—but another part of me wants to keep digging, I guess.
The more I itch, the more I scratch, and the more I scratch, the deeper I go. The deeper I go, the more the pain flares when I peel up layers of skin. The pain proves I’m alive, and I fear that if I stop itching I’ll stop living. Like a parasite, if that itch dies then it means it no longer recognizes me as a living organism it can sap resources from. Sometimes I wonder if it feeds off my feelings rather than my blood, if I’m itching because I’m not feeling something I’m supposed to, the body’s way of signalling that something is wrong or damaged or needs repair. Perhaps that’s why my life has felt malnourished, like a world filled with color but lacking just one.
Whatever the case, I stopped trying to define it, what I felt and what I didn’t. Nothing seemed quite correct—to say I am aromantic when I have this obsessive attachment to the notion of love seems wrong, somehow, yet the disconnect in my brain between me and romantic inclinations imply it. So now I call whatever affection I have for things or people love, because love is whatever you want it to be. I ignore my mother when she presses me about why I don’t have a partner. I listen to friends talk about dating and feel a little sad I have no stories of my own to offer. I’m perfectly happy without engaging in romance, but truthfully I’m still a little bitter, because love is a connective force, whether between two people in it or any two strangers who have both experienced it. I don’t have that common ground, and it’d be a lie to say I don’t wish to be able to find it someday.
Maybe one day I’ll dig deep enough to find the source of it all, that living itch deep inside of me coughing up these oozing blisters and random bruises and sourceless scars. If I tear into myself, consume enough of my physical manifestation, perhaps something will click, my exteriors stripped and the secrets hidden in my own flesh and bone and pulsing veins finally laid bare. For now, though, there is one simple explanation. My eczema, my autocannibalism, the way I try to tear down the barriers of my skin—it’s all, as everything often is, simply a yearning for love. I think that makes me human enough.
A Stare
by Adam Penna
Jessie Jen is a writer from San Jose, CA, currently residing in Boston. She loves cats, collecting stationery, and mahjong with her family.
Adam Penna lives in a rich man’s house fronting a magic spring and on the edge of a murder gorge. He is a father to six and a husband to one.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 