Bite Marks

By Sidhi Gupta

False callings of maturity engraved me with the very first bite marks.

“She’s just anxious, paranoid, she’ll grow out of it.” Said my teacher to my worried

parents, whose hands were held tight together, as if my disease was just a pair of

shoes a size too big.

I didn’t. Because it’s not a pair of shoes. It’s an illness, a mutating apocalyptic virus

that moves with me, the unfortunate host. Every time I decide I’ve gotten better, it

changes shape to something my mind can’t wrap around.

I can still taste the papery pill capsule slicked over my tongue. Water, swallow, repeat.

The same order every time. I do that a lot — the repeat part.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

It’s what they say you have when you’re halfway to crazy but you completely know it. I

shake my head and rinse my hands till my wrists flake and bleed. No amount of hand

cream will fix it, because I’ll just wash it off anyways. I always do. I sing the ABCs

under my breath, and watch soap suds splatter over my palms, almost smiling/ wincing

in pleasure/ pain as I imagine the Black Death particles slide off of my hands.

I stand up. Get off my bed. It’s tough. The world will end, unless I cross that threshold

three more times. I’m like a superhero who does nothing, helps no one, and bares the

weight of my own spiral of blistered and boiling thoughts. No amount of scrunching my

eyes close, and ripping out my hair from the roots numbs it out. I walk with whispers in

my ears, bitter everythings.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

I tell my mother I love her or she’ll die in a freak accident. Which I deem as not good at

all, but for a split second there it told me I would want that, for my loved ones to be

hurt. But I don’t want that, I know I don’t want that. It tells me to wash my hands one

more time or I meant what I said. My hands bleed.

I sit in silence, but it’s never really quiet. I wonder what it would be like to hear real

silence. Like if my mind was a library, and I’d only ever hear the thoughts every once in

a while — like when a librarian shushes someone politely. That must be what it is like

for everyone else, silence.

I sit within the churning of my stomach and the ticking of my head, a weird third place

that keeps me cold and fearful, even with my blanket over my feet.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

I avoid large bodies of water, they most definitely carry brain-eating amoeba, so I’ll sit

out of the family trip to the beach. I'm not feeling very well. And I’ll take my sushi with

cucumber because raw will definitely kill me, and I’ll bake my brownies for an extra ten

minutes. I prefer gooey brownies, but salmonella is never worth it. And I won’t let my

dog kiss my hands, she could have rabies, maybe the shots didn’t work. Rabies are

100% fatal.

I feel its teeth chow on my neck, and its claws cover my eyes. Bite marks on me

forever.

In some scramble of song lyrics and movie quotes, I find another oozing thought. It

smells like rubbing alcohol, but not the clean kind, the kind that burns your eyes and

hurts your nose. It looks like the time in third grade where you were forced to play

dodgeball, and someone who took the game too seriously falls down so hard when you

look at them, they’re sobbing and their bone is poking out of their leg.

It’s gruesome.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Do it once more, you have to, that’ll make it go away for a while. I breathe in and out.

Making sure to breathe through my teeth so it filters the sickly air, even though I’m

smart enough to know that’s not how filtering works.

I’ve done it all: exposure, and pretending to be normal, skipping cracks on the floor

because it’ll break my mothers back, closing my eyes, swallowing little pills, but

sometimes the venom is too much and I have to sit rocking back and forth wondering

what war crimes I must have done in a past life, or maybe unknowingly in this one, to

be cursed with teeth over my skin like this.

Once it’s all over and I’ve done it again and again, I’m left with bite marks on my body.

My hands bleed.

By Sidhi Gupta