The following short-form scabs grew out of the same body of thinking, reading, and picking.

On her knees, reaching under the radiator, a wet rug thrashing vigorously like a fish out of water, like a fish out of water on her knees she’s cleaning. Clots of moist dust, fat, and hair, hair, dust, and fat clots caught in the rug’s fibres disgust her fibres; the rug as an extension of herself, two subjects conjoined, a syntactical siamese. She repeats to herself that it’s only her own hair and some cooking oil, some hair and some oil, and some skin turned dust, but she cannot explain away being repulsed by it, pieces of herself, a subject turned object.

​​Once a piece of a body is parted with, who does it belong to? Its value within the metabolic economy is extinguished as it enters the biowaste market or becomes enshrined as a morbid relic and starts accumulating value of another kind. She tries to imagine all the derivatives of her body and all the places they could be in now. Imagine. Her umbilical cord, shrivelled and purplish, a lifeline, the ownership of which had been shared with her mother, still resting somewhere in an air-tight bag, a lifeline at the bottom of a drawer, at her childhood flat, shared with her mother, hundreds kilometers away. It is accompanied by an incongruous collection of baby teeth—she counted thirty-one, meaning they belonged to more than one individual—sharing a wooden box with an equally incongruous collection of bobby pins, buttons, rubber bands, pins and buttons, fibres, and demonetised currency. A surgically removed nail that gave way to a sliver. All the skin flakes gathered on a disposable towel at the bottom of a phototherapy cabin, spread at her feet, flakes, scales, telltale of the snakelike cycle of renewal. Throughout their life, an average person sheds roughly half of their body weight in epidermis—eczema and psoriasis patients four to eight times more. More teeth. A little, slithery fleshworm, stealthily disposed of in a sterile container after the appendectomy at the age of seven, and a square patch of skin, a sliver dispatched to an unknown destination for a biopsy, a few years later, dispatched, disposed, to situate the cause of sudden depigmentation, the flesh, the skin, turning white, sterile, the word coming back—‘idiopathic’, that is, spontaneous, that is, we don’t know.

Why, she thinks, this repulsion at a piece parted with, think repulsion at body parts, think repulsion at parting? Why do pubic hair, nails, and eyelashes transubstantiate from tokens of erotic desire into organic waste, into waste, objectified subject turned undesirable object?

Is it too obvious to state it’s about death?

If  you want, I will show you how to challenge and eventually rid yourself of your desire for cleanliness. There’s something stiflingly conservative to it. On the contrary, there’s something enlivening in exploring how many days I can go without a proper toilette, unbeknownst to others, like a person carrying a delicious secret—being continuously surprised by how my body manages its own oil and fat and odour economy, absorbing so much of its own secretions, inviting me to push the boundaries ever farther. Perhaps you could consider these a-hygienic strategies a private way of waging class war or practicing circular economy?

Start by no longer holding breath when passing the piss corner. Use the subway. Carress the railing. Rest your head against the subway’s window, press your nose against the glass. Allow strangers to breathe into your face. Know their scent and let them know yours. Look up at them when they address you. Shake their hands. Handle coins. Stay close. Use public toilets. Sit down, think. Shower less—but do wash your hands. Increase the waxiness of your skin. Value its viscosity. Carry the city tangled in your hair. The streets’ texture. Eat while walking along a busy street. Listen to the traffic. Watch the synthetic sunset. Open your mouth and try to swallow the sun. Follow the five-seconds rule. Be open to anything. Ingest everything. Now, do you feel an internal satisfaction, pride even, at overcoming your inner disgust?

On the bus, I take off my gloves and a thread of black polyester wedges under a scab crowning the tip of my finger, which comes slightly undone.  
Off the bus, I put my gloves on again, waiting for transfer.
On the bus, again, gloves off, picking at the scab.
On the bus, still, answering a call from a friend, picking at the scab.

I tell her how two days ago, while julienning ginger, I nearly chopped off my fingertip. It held by a thread and now it’s held by the scab.

‘I got this iodine ointment that I need to rub in every day,’ I say, ‘but I don’t think it’s going to heal.’

‘So, we finally chose tiles for the kitchen,’ she says, ‘We’re gonna go with the terracotta ones I told you about.’

‘I think it might be dead,’ I say, picking at the scab.

‘We will go with the running bond, it has this rustic feel to it,’ she, again. ‘We’ve already found someone to lay them next Thursday!’

‘It’s quite fascinating, actually, having a piece of necrotic tissue still attached to your body. I’m, like, partly undead now…’

‘Can you imagine what a mason makes? I tell you, we’re in the wrong line of work,’ the friend chuckles. ‘But between the mortgage and my pay raise, we’ll scrape by.’

‘Listen, I have to go…’ I mutter, as I get off the bus, and get on with picking at my scab, only now, the scab is gone, along with my fingertip. ‘Shit!’

As I get off the call, the bus takes off, and I start rushing down the street, then another and another, moving farther and farther away from the stop, the bus, and the seat just behind the driver’s cabin (‘the safest place on the bus’, mum). Somewhere between the prickly polyester fibres of the blotchy upholstering, there it is: a pinkish pebble,
a discrete part of my body, inscribed with the unique papillary signature. The most original, unlaboured piece of writing I’ve ever produced, left behind on the bus. What if someone picks it up and reads it?

I’m surprised by how abraded I feel, and by how, the more definitive the parting, the more undefined the measure of loss; ‘apply a fingertip of ointment to the surface of the wound… it only takes a fingertip’s worth of lead dust to poison a child… consider just ¼ of a pill, or a small finger dab…’ What’s a fingertip’s worth worth?

With the plump, carefree pad of the opposing finger, I inspect the stump, so oversensitive that it feels unfamiliar, almost alien. A patch of newborn skin tentatively covers the lesion, thin and stretched like a fish egg about to burst. Next thing I know, my nail is gradually applying pressure, and a bloody bubble starts building up, prying open a narrow crevice along the edge. One pop later, a mixture of disappointment and relief washes over me. My body’s physiological response to my poking inquiry comes as a somehow reassuring exchange.

I don’t have any band-aid on me. I wonder who still does; it’s as if band-aids belonged to a different era–of boys, suspender shorts, and slingshots–but at the bottom of my coat’s pocket, I come across a now stained five-euro bill, a single skin dusted with loose tobacco, and a clump of dried seaweed.

Soon, bleeding abates and so does temporary relief. I’m still somehow disappointed in myself, still chafed at this morbid, childish curiosity–or is it malice–one that picks, pokes, and pries, and puts me in all kinds of situations. One that has put me in this situation: my friend is getting a house and I lost my fingertip.

Spring entering summer. You’re entering that blissful time of exploring certain areas of adulthood while comfortably ignorant of others. Privileges of youth and simply privileges. Experiences so intensely sensorial that they beg for qualifiers. City park, seagulls and boys, sun-kissed cherries and sand in your teeth. Bicycles walked on the beach, swallowed flies, burnt noses, lukewarm beers and flavoured smokes. Microdermabrasion and sea breeze on your face.

You’re cycling downhill, taking big gulps of iodised air. It’s supposed to be good for thyroid function, but you’ve just found out that yours has been affected by an autoimmune syndrome, gradually damaging the gland. Apparently, your thyroid is much older than you. Your thyroid is having a midlife crisis. Tired thyroid all the time. This affects your entire system, including prolactin release, halting your reproductive clock. Your body contains temporal multitudes–its asynchrony worries you. Spring entering summer and you’re entering new routines: hormone replacement, sunblock, and SSRIs.

The bike jolts you out of your thoughts as you nearly flip over when the handlebar gives way under the weight of your upper body. The stem bolt loosened, and the handlebar is now dangling, helplessly shrugging its grips. You sigh at the realisation that you have to choose between walking your bike all the way home or trying to board a bus crowded with excited vacationers and begrudging locals.

Iodine–hold–exhale. In fish, the swim bladder helps control movement and maintain depth. Sharks, however, lack this organ, so certain species have developed a workaround. By surfacing to ingest gulps of air and holding them in their stomachs, they are able to conserve energy and remain motionless, waiting for their prey. This is called neutral buoyancy.

You take out your mobile, catching a glimpse of your face’s reflection, covered in a mélange of scabs from your obsessive skin-picking routine and a recent cosmetic procedure. The first thing that pops up when you unlock the screen is the chat history with your ex, which you’ve been devotionally studying over the past weeks. Exegesis of break-up–another self-excoriating ritual.

The logic of longing triumphantly points out that you’re in his neighbourhood, and the only thing you need is a little bit of hex key magic. A few minutes later, the message you’ve been typing has been edited so severely that it no longer resembles language. You call instead.
By now, the air bubble you’ve been holding in has been entirely deflated, and your stomach drops the moment he answers. You make your plea striving for the utmost casualness, but ending up stumbling over each b: bother…but…basically…bolt…bike…but…bus…borrow…busy… bother. He’ll meet you at the park, he answers, by the monument with two entwined fishes.

Sitting down at its base, legs curled up, picking the unprovenanced scab on your knee, you try to focus on remembering where you got it from, but other memories keep surfacing unbidden. The way you handed over his camera, asking him to delete some pictures, as if shame were the reverse of intimacy, as if doing so would erase the image of your body from his memory–it is and it will. You don’t remember the exact exchange, but you remember tears eliciting tears. Rejected embraces. You remember you lied.

You lied during the phone call, in between all the b’s, when you told him the handlebar failed and you crashed the bike. Words burst out before you were able to acknowledge the ulterior motif. ‘Pisces are incredibly empathetic, so be gentle with their feelings and show them that you care deeply for them. Their great sense of intuition also makes them a great manipulator–Pisces will know exactly what strings to pull in order to get their way.’  In the stumbling logic of the moment, the uncomplicated reality of the scratched knee seemed more likely to elicit empathy than the cumbersome emotional wound. You’re still hurt and want something to show for your pain, even if this means resorting to sadfishing. But this is innocuous enough, you tell yourself. It’s just a story, and don’t we use fiction all the time to learn something about ourselves? What else is writing if not empathy baiting, anyway?

While pondering this, you’re slowly peeling off the scab, that unexpected plot device, scale by scale, starting at the edges. It hasn’t ripened yet, and the consistency in the centre is very different: moist and adhesive. It rolls up under your fingernails. A small open lesion reveals itself, pitiful and desperate like a gulping fish, and you write your story all over your exposed shin.

‘Scab’ is also a pejorative term used to describe a worker whose overcompliance sustains exploitation–their own and their fellow workers’. One who refuses to unionise or who breaks picketing lines. For a long time, I didn’t want to acknowledge my ‘co-occupation’ with eczema, that entangled state of being, described by Maria Fusco in her sick script I often return to. For a long time, I was a scab, while my skin was on full-on strike, rallying up the body–autoimmune revolution in the works. This denial took deep root in my distrust of the medical-industrial complex, but also (though I was less eager to admit it) in the dualistic paradigm ingrained by years of religious and academic education–how conveniently eczema becomes sublimated into philosophy. At what point does self-determination cross over into self-destruction? It’s complicated.

During a flare-up, I’m unable to relate to much. In reverse-empathy gear, each experience is weighed against the strain it exerts upon my body. Is this really worth taking that scorching, lukewarm shower for? Forcing your arms down the zinc-laced elbow sleeves? Patting talc into all these folds you didn’t even know existed? I’m so sore I cannot make it...

These words come from a place of exhaustion–and exhaustion breeds antagonism. Having affected most areas of my body and my life, how has eczema, unavoidably, affected my writing?

The writer’s body and the text’s body are imperfectly communicating vessels. I often write when I’m exhausted, itchy, and all dried up. Probably because more often than not, I’m exhausted, itchy, and all dried up. This proves the miraculous point that you can pour from an empty cup.

If text is a body, mine is covered in scabs–obsessive, reedited, overlaboured. The scabs are accretions of discourse attempting to patch up the cracks left behind by giving in to the overbearing itch to interpret. Admittedly, I prefer scabs to scars, so I routinely reopen the same wound, reopen the same wound. It’s bad practice…

Bad writing doesn’t go down smoothly; it is dense, excessive, and pathetic, always self-, style- and form-aware. Instead of unhampered immersion, it generates a cluster of more complex symptoms in reaction to a text: inducing affect, probing readerly empathy, and interrupting the illusion of identification. This kind of writing cultivates its own partiality. ‘Good writing is direct, effective, clean as a bleached bone. Bad writing is all flesh, and dirty flesh at that: clogged with a build-up of clutter and crud, knick-knacks and fripperies encrusted on every surface, a kind of gluey scum gathering in the chinks.’

And how has my skin changed due to writing? Writing–working–keeps my hands from scratching. Usually, I type with my eyes affixed to the screen, fingers racing with thoughts, but the moment I pause, they drift directly towards my face, arms, or reachable areas of my back. Above my desk, beside a planner, a black-and-white silkscreen by Ryan Gander thunders: ‘Time is your greatest asset – Dad’. Beneath it, a pink post-it note chimes in: ‘Don’t pick!’.

I scratch leisurely too. My obsessive picking is a gesture of appreciation of the scab’s magic–I can never have enough of the routine. At times, I can’t wait and peek prematurely, but the scab patiently regrows and never reveals its tricks.

Many thanks to Francesca, Émile, Reinier, and Tine. The passage about bad writing comes from Shelley Jackson’s ‘Stitch Bitch’ (1997); Maria Fusco’s work I’m referring to is titled ‘ECZEMA!’ (2019).