do not pick the scab
2025/october/16nonfiction
you can look, and look so hard that it feels like you tore it right off, and now there's a gaping wound, and—
do not touch it. it feels so good to run your fingers over that patch and hinge your fingernail on its edges. apply a little bit of pressure, use your skin for leverage, and slowly lift it from the edges. your skin tinges a little bit from the pain of prematurely removing the platelets and fibrin that are simply trying to do their job. if you're lucky, the wound is mostly healed, and a slight pink tint is found where there once was a lesion that had leaked blood and serous drainage.
it's almost irresistible, and some days, seemingly impossible to leave it alone. something deep inside you will tell you to remove it, and in doing so, there will be no consequences of your actions. but there are, and they can be ever so plentiful. that scab could be covering up a mostly healed wound, or on the other hand, something that could never heal because you never allowed it to.
most of the time, it's the latter. wounds cannot heal if you don't let them. this applies not just to your own, but to those found on others that you could have inflicted. or maybe it's a laceration in the body of your relationship because you couldn't just learn to leave things well enough alone.
you have to leave them alone. i know it feels good to reach out, and i know you're coming from a good place. maybe if you told them how you really felt multiple times over, reality could change. maybe it'll make them come back, make them forgive you, make things all okay. sometimes you find yourself in a few quiet moments during the day, remembering ideas and words that you'd forgotten to mention. your head tells you: maybe the forgotten and the unsaid could fix things.
the thing is that you are not the only one with a scab that shouldn't be picked. these wounds go both ways. when they ask you to give them time and space, hell, maybe leave them alone entirely, you have to. it goes beyond you, and them, and everything else. there's more things you may not realize that should not have been picked, and had you left it alone and given it up to time (or in this context, the body's immune system), things could've turned out better.
but you didn't, and you still don't, and now you're left with a scar you can't get rid of. alongside that is the knowledge that had you never picked it and exerted more self-control, there was a chance that it would have never gotten this bad. now you will spend an extended amount of time ruminating on the hows and whys of dealing with the scar, as opposed to having left it alone and let things fall where they may.
i only learned to look at the scab (it's okay if you do) after picking the wound so often that its size and depth had grown tenfold—now it's as raw as it can be.
i'm sorry.
