Bad Habits

In our society, we are defined very much by the sicknesses we hold. ADD, OCD, lactose intolerance, things that two-hundred years ago, would have qualified us only to be called healthy, because none of these are terminal. My eyes swell from time to time sometimes when they’re irritated but mostly just when they feel the need to get my attention. “We’re still here, and we’re rather important.” When I was eight years old I took the thick tie of a bathrobe and tied it twice tightly around my head, pushing my eyes back into their sockets and making a hum of pain flow through my brain until I could hear nothing else and then laid in my bed until the humming itself became nothing. It was a Saturday, the only day my mother didn’t pay attention to my eating habits and she was at work, so I was free to experiment with this body of mine. I kept the robe rope over my eyes for the whole day and night trying to get a glimpse of what the blind feel like. The next morning laying in bed, I removed the robe and found my eyes had crusted over so thick I couldn’t open them. I would have cried, but my mom told me not to, so instead I laughed but only for a minute. I couldn’t see the bruises on my skin that my siblings had made the day before when they figured out my game, but I knew they were there. I couldn’t see the blood on my pillow from where I cut my ear on something hard and wood sounding as I fell down the stairs for the second time. I couldn’t see the cake icing on my cheek that I was sure I’d washed away and I couldn’t see my mother, but I knew she was there. Occasionally, she dropped water and some kind of lacquer onto my eyes and let it sit to loosen my bodies self-defenses. “Am I gonna go blind,” I asked. And my mother lied, “I don’t know.” She waited for a moment, the way people calculate how exactly to teach a lesson and said, “was it worth it?” I whispered, somberly, but with conviction that I had to know. I had to know.