One afternoon, when I was a kid - no younger than eight, but no older than twelve - I spent a very happy afternoon cutting myself with a pocket knife. It wasn't a very big knife. In fact, it was tiny and was attached to a keyring. It was, however, extremely sharp. I sat down one Saturday afternoon in front of a movie on General George Armstrong Custer. Whilst watching the film (which was good), I slowly and carefully cut nicks across the top of my foot and on my wrist. They weren't deep nicks, just deep enough to bleed a little and then dry up. It didn't hurt. Nobody saw me.
Most of those wounds quickly healed, but I still carry some scars from that afternoon - a couple of almost invisible white marks on my left wrist, just above my watch.
I don't know why I did it, and I didn't do it again.
Every scar tells a story: there's the snick on my lip caused by my careless teenage hand wielding a blunt razor; the white line on the top of my head from where my three year old younger brother threw a plastic bus at me when I was watching TV; the lump on my forehead from when my elder brother smacked my head against a garage door; the jagged line along my right thumb where I tried to catch a mug just at the instant it smashed on the side of the hot-water machine and its smaller, more hooked reflection on the palm of my left hand; the small purple mark on my right shin, the remains of a pressure sore from some ill-fitting ski boots; the faint mark over my ribs caused by the studs from someone's rugby boots as I drove them into the ground on a pitch just off the M69 near Coventry when I was 17... I'm 32 years old, and I've got the scars to prove it. If you were selling me on Ebay, you'd probably have to say that I was slightly worn.
I've got some other scars too, scars of unknown provenance. Perhaps they're the most interesting of all.
MonSter syndrome
16 hours ago
It's funny the things we do when we're younger.
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