Content Notes: self-harm
Spring 2021
My Mom Says Just Stop Picking Woodlief McCabe The skin on my lips is always bleeding or broken, dry, and cracking. When asked, I tell people something about the season or the air. It’s all my fault though. When I am alone my hands find themselves on my face, gently trawling the surface for new texture, the rough edges of peeling skin. The fingertips are one of the most sensitive areas of the human body. So are the lips. Sometimes I use my teeth. I start at the bottom of my lower lip and graze it slowly until it finds purchase, then bite and pull and wince until a flake of dead skin is between my teeth and a drop of the reddest blood in my body forms at the corner of my mouth. Sometimes I let it sit there, wondering how big it will get before it starts to drip and endanger my clothes with a permanent stain. It never does. The lips are also one of the fastest healing parts of the body. It takes only twenty-seven days for the skin to fully regenerate on its own. That’s less than a month. Less than February. If you kiss me on Valentine’s Day, you’re gone from my body by my birthday. I don’t wear lipstick. I like the look and it covers up the scarring, but it doesn’t taste good and it dries my lips out even more. I end my day ripping the pigment out of my body and the makeup mixes with the blood under my fingernails. As I run my hands underwater I spend too much time aware of the rawness against the air when I inhale and the stinging pain when I finally take a tissue to wipe the color off completely. I don’t know if it’s a compulsion. I’ve never asked anyone. In front of the mirror, I dig my nails into the softest skin I have. I rip myself apart and eat the day off of myself without even thinking. I cannot bear to speak with the mouth I had yesterday so I make it painful to speak tomorrow. My lips 37
