Lucy had a theory that we could measure the gravity of our traumas by simply cutting through our skin with a blunt knife and letting what she called the crawlies out. Every day after school, she and I showed each other our arms and legs and other parts of our bodies disfigured with cuts, each a different shade of purple due to another unspoken trauma in our lives. I had one eight-inch cut to her six that snaked along the soft tissue of my elbow, shapeless and ripe like a fruit; hers had the shape of a lion’s mouth roaring across the cap of her left shoulder, a hurt that was inflicted by her father who abandoned them for another woman when Lucy was old enough to see through his lies.
What Lucy didn’t know was that I, too, kind of lied to her by using my brother’s scout knife to make my cuts appear deeper than they really were. The only traumatic experience I’d had by then was the day my cousin Katie stole the love of my life who was foolish enough to believe a thorny sixth-grader would be a better romantic investment than the fledgling Catholic rose that I was. Over the next few years, however, I watched him cruise along a series of successful relationships while I withered away with weird self-explorations in the privacy of my bedroom. Lucy said she could tell how much I was suffering just by looking at the cut on my elbow, which was, in her words, one of the biggest, ugliest crawlies she’d ever seen. Her eyes on my scar, I just hoped that she wasn’t the kind of person who could tell a lie from the truth. I hoped she wouldn’t take me for one of those girls who faked their crawlies for fun or attention.
The more we compared our scars, the less the world around me began to appear all right. I started seeing traumas everywhere, from the slightest crack in the pavement to a wayward wrinkle on a person’s face. I noticed the hurt in people through the darker spots of their skin, which might at first seem like a mole or a birthmark but on a closer look I supposed was probably the doing of some disciplinarian parent or abusive spouse. Daylight around them bent from the edges when they passed me by on the street, and nighttime made their aches even more visible by turning them almost completely black with all the hurt in their hearts.
My crawlies, too, multiplied with theirs, twisted my cuts into countless shapes. I started having difficulty finding an explanation for the marks that colored my body like some invasive species, let alone telling anyone what the crawlies were actually about. When confronted by my parents and then the school counselor, all I could offer in return was a clumsily crafted story on some tiny black dots that nestled just under the surface of my skin and fed off of my worries until nothing was left. On both occasions, I wished Lucy were in the room with me. She would have done a better job explaining the crawlies for what they truly were, a tear in the fabric of our bodily universes that took the shape of, as she claimed, the exact opposite of what we wished of our lives.
“Are you having headaches?” asked one of the interns at the hospital my mother took me after I fainted in the girl’s bathroom of Walgreens due to severe pain. “Fever? Double vision? Panic attacks?”
None of the symptoms he listed sounded anywhere near how I felt most of the time. My scars scratched from the contours that gave them a character. I wanted to rip my flesh off, and I burned with regret for lying to Lucy. Lucy reassured me that my physical reaction to the crawlies was perfectly normal, that traumas had a funny way of showing their true impact, that fainting was next to nothing given how deep my hurts appeared to be. She told me the crawlies were known for reminding us of everything that’s wrong with our lives and a public enemy number one to our already fluctuating self-esteem. Listening to her, I tried to imagine what my cuts would have looked like if my traumas were genuine. I was terrified by the mental image of how the crawlies, the authentic ones, would blanket me in my sleep, how they would bring me to a near-death condition if I ever managed to wake up. I chose to believe her, no questions asked.
Lucy, in the meantime, turned more purple each day with the increasing intensity of her new cuts. Everybody knew her mother had been in and out of jobs for quite some time and, as the rumor had it, experimenting on the wildest drugs. Some folks said her father was in the picture again. When I asked, she refused to talk about it, promising me that everything was all right, despite the physical evidence to the contrary. My cuts still appeared longer than hers, but hers multiplied in quantity, which made me envy her in a funny way and want to have a true trauma that I could keep close to my heart for the rest of my life. I provoked my parents at every chance I could to have a beating. I picked the busiest highway on my way to school, walking dangerously close to the speeding cars. Having a lover was one of the most commonly known causes for having crawlies and, remembering how much my cousin’s betrayal had hurt me, I looked for every way to reenact my only bad experience to date. I asked boys out in the school cafeteria and gave them half-handjobs from outside of their pants to be more convincing. I kissed girls at the skate park to see if I could elicit anything more than a fleeting spark.
Joe from pre-Calc was the only boy who returned my interest, gifting me mint gums every time I sucked him off under the stage where the cheerleaders practiced. I switched between smiles and scowls all the time to make him at once love and hate me. I let him hold my face and tell me how much he loved me, only to not return his calls or texts for a few days after. One Sunday afternoon, after walking to the beach and skinny dipping together, I broached the subject of the crawlies. He seemed indifferent during the entire exchange, distracted by the girl who was sunning on a rock farther down the beach. I was upset with him for not taking me seriously enough, though it hardly came as a surprise. I’d suspected all along that he might be what Lucy called a nullie, someone who’d lived a sterile enough life not to have any type of crawlies.
I was the one who left him in the end.
Weeks passed by with an excruciating sense of boredom and loneliness. Whatever was going on between Lucy and her parents had made us drift apart, although I still worried about her all the time. I craved something new to make up for her absence, someone who could help me define the roadlines of my future in the same way those branch-like scars rounding across my forearm defined by one endless circle, one of the more recent cuts I’d inflicted on myself following my breakup with Joe. I’d stopped going to school in the meantime, so I spent most of my days picking my scabs in bed and binging back-to-back soap operas. Mom told me I started to stink and that it might not be such a bad idea to jump into a shower. I couldn’t remember when it was last I visited the bathroom, let alone had my body in contact with any form of water. Even then, I chose to let my body simmer in my own dirt, in the aftermath of my own flesh and blood.
I surfed the World Wide Web nonstop, the only place where I felt welcome (and unjudged) for the state of my body. That’s when I met @wk8765432 on one of those forums dedicated to plastic surgery victims, a user that claimed on their profile to be a German war prisoner in one of their past lives. @wk8765432’s profile picture looked beyond sexless, or beyond any definition I knew of sex and gender. I wasn’t sure about their pronouns, so I stuck to a username basis the whole time. We talked about our spirit animals (a topic I knew only through Lucy) and how some sicknesses, including cancer, were probably just a government propaganda (of which I knew nothing).
The first time we opened our mics, I confided in @wk8765432 about the crawlies. To my disappointment, @wk8765432 just told me that I didn’t look too bad in my profile picture, a snapshot Lucy had taken one day after Mass. In the picture, I was leaning over the altar to carve one of my more recent crawlies on the marble top. Before I could say anything, @wk8765432 made another comment on my looks, and then some more, until I lost count. In a matter of seconds, @wk8765432’s remarks heightened into a confusing blend of praise and deprecation, and at one point I had to close my eyes to imagine a man and a woman standing next to each other in a room fully submerged in the dark, their faces bathed in the blue haze of the monitor, each spitting on the screen in turns. I imagined them shaking their heads in disapproval and exchanging distasteful remarks about my outlook, my hair, my life decisions, which resumed until the battery of my computer died and left me all alone in my own dark.
For days, my body ached in places I didn’t even know existed, bringing all my crawlies to light. I had difficulty sleeping at night, feeling the tingling sensation of everything that was shifting places inside my body and trying to break through the membrane of my skin. Everything at home made me think of mortality, from the fake flowers on our dinner table to the nearly lifeless state of my goldfish. I rejected breathing during certain periods of day in the same way a body rejects a foreign object. I drew different flowers on my skin using my brother’s scout knife like a brush, stroking my body into a life-sized artwork of unbearable physical and emotional damage. When I finally remembered to check my phone after five days, I didn’t find any messages from Joe or @wk8765432 but thirteen missed calls from Lucy, next to a text that read, call me when u see this.
When Lucy and I met the next morning, each of us seemed unrecognizable to the other with all the fresh disfigurations in our bodies. Lucy’s face was cut all over like a bad tattoo, the outline of tears etched under each eyelid for what she called every part of herself that she had to kill to set her crawlies free. She was shivering the whole time as if she were possessed, seemingly on the verge of collapse. I held her bloodied hands and tried to soothe her with half-truths on how brave she was, how everything was going to be all right, though I was dizzy with pain myself. I listened to her mumble something about her father, about how he had it coming for how he’d treated her and her mother all this time. I didn’t ask, I didn’t push.
“Would you like to go for another round?” I said instead, gesturing at the knife in her hands.
“It’s all because of this stupid town,” she said, drawing her cigarette closer to her mouth like a lipstick.
“Or crawlies,” I said, snatching the knife from her. “Crawlies.”
