Scratching the Surface

I had always been skeptical about religion growing up.

Despite being regularly surrounded by people who quoted bible verses from memory and praised God above all else, I never felt what they must have felt.

I never felt that all-consuming need to delve into something bigger than myself.

It didn’t make sense to me.

Why would I trade everything for some entity I couldn’t even see?

Or taste?

Or feel?

I had only tried to ask the question once, but my why? resulted in my mother dissolving into tears and Hail Mary’s and my father locking me in my room.

I didn’t understand it then.

But boy, do I understand it now.

Religion is something you can feel, I’ve learned.

And sniff, and taste, and smoke, and shoot up.

***

The first time Bobby caught my eye was at my second college party. It was in this guy's basement that was by our campus.

He had gestured me over with a bright grin and even brighter eyes, and something about the way his incisors glinted in the overhead basement light intrigued me. So I went.

Told my friends from church (they were all my mom's friends' kids. She was keeping an eye on me, even from all the way across town) that I would be back in a moment.

Bobby’s smile had turned mischievous by now, and when he leaned down so he could whisper in my ear, he asked me if I had ever tried Molly.

I remember blinking up at him then. Remember quelling the urge to tell him that I didn’t know a Molly, that I didn’t know a lot of people, but something about the way he asked made me tamp down the question.

He probably saw the confusion on my face because he laughed.

It wasn't a mean laugh, I remember. Not like the laugh that tittered out of mom when I tried to ask her if she would consider me going to a public college instead of a Christian one. They didn’t have the program I wanted to take, I had tried telling her. The person I wanted to be didn’t belong in the tiny Christian college 30 minutes away from my doorstep.

I think she thought I was joking.

Allowing me to move out to a place on campus was as much as they would do to loosen the leash.

I still felt it, though, felt its worn leather digging into my neck.

It made it hard to breathe.

So when Bobby offered me that tiny pill with a smiley face on it (almost looked like a rocket), I took it from him and slipped it under my tongue before my mom's friends' kids could see.

That feeling.

It was like I had stumbled across those pearly white gates the priest at Sunday Mass always talked about. Like I peeked my head just through its opening, just enough to see all its glory, but still not close enough to immerse myself in it. I wanted to, though. Oh, how I wanted to.

For a second, I understood what my mom meant when she droned on about doing all she could to make it to heaven.

I hung out with Bobby a lot after that. Even when my mom's friends' sons and daughters' faces started to change from concerned to judgmental after they noticed my dopey smiles and blown pupils.

I didn’t care, though.

I had Bobby, and Bobby has the keys to paradise.

***

“I told you not to go on that shit, Grace.” Bobby hisses down at me as he wheels me out of the hospital doors.

I don’t answer him; instead, I roll my eyes, focusing my attention on my phone.

I’m trying to text my mom, but it's hard for me to focus on the letters on my screen. My head is still pounding, and the letters are shaking a bit.

My fingers shake, too, but that's for a different reason. That's the ants that crawl over my skin, frantic, feverishly. They've been here, invisible, just under the layer of my skin, since I woke up in that hospital bed.

Thank god I thought to put Bobby down as my emergency contact, my mother would have been a mess coming to pick me up. She would hate to see me like this. She’d probably chalk it up to the devil's work. My father probably would have killed me.

I set my phone in my lap, the prickly feeling finally getting to be too much, and rub at my arms aggressively. It does little to quell the intense itch that’s started to thrum underneath my skin.

I jump when Bobby's hands close down on my arms, squeezing them tight enough for pain to bloom at the spots where his fingers dig into my skin.

“The scratching would also stop if you stopped.”

His voice is a growl but I can hear the shake in his words, the worry.

I tilt my head up, looking up at his face hovering right over mine. I stare at him questioningly and his grip loosens right away.

He rips his hands away and I can hear him run them through his hair now.

“Sorry. Sorry.” He breathes it out. “I just… Grace, you scared me. You scare me.”

I try to crick my neck around to see him but he’s right behind me and I can’t turn that far.

Bobby keeps telling me I would stop scratching if I lay off the H.

He’s wrong, though.

I keep trying to tell him this, but he only looks at me with pity and a bit of worry in his eyes whenever I say so.

“Come around so I can see you,” I tell him, softly. He sighs, but the sound is quickly followed by footsteps.

He looks down at me, lips twisted, eyes never fully landing on mine. Instead, they land on my arms, trace over the red welts that cover the freshly scratched spots.

I give him a smile. The one that shows all my teeth, the one that makes people want to take care of me and hand me over needles without question.

“I’m right here. I’m good. It was just a little too much this time.”

His eyes widen, and that frantic look he's been trying to hide can't be hidden any longer. The fear exposes itself in his pupils. It wafts off of him, bleeds from him.

“A little too much?! You overdosed, Grace. I thought you were dead!”

I shrug at him, keeping my smile in place. “But I’m not, Bobby. I’m not. I’m right here.”

And a sense of deja vu hits me as the words leave my mouth.

I’m right here.

It feels like something I always have to remind people of.

***

I had been scratching way before I even met Bobby. I tried to tell him when he first noticed the red patches that had started to line my arms, legs, stomach, anywhere I could reach, really, but he didn’t really seem like he was listening.

He looked at me the same way Mom and Pops looked at me when I asked them for money. Whenever I ask them for money. With alarm and a bit of disgust. That look, if anything, is what made me itch even worse than the comedown.

My dad had just scowled at me, and my mom had yowled, like a cat who just got its tail grabbed, screaming about how ‘I was just going to use the money to fund my filthy habit’.

I disagree that it's filthy, but I wasn’t going to lie to the woman, so I said yes, that’s exactly what I plan to do with the money.

I was scratching long before I ever started H.

I’ve had a prickly feeling that rested under my skin ever since mom used to force me into tight, fluffy dresses and make me prance across stages in front of hundreds of judges.

As soon as I turned that age where I was old enough to recognize the hot sting of judgment and the shame that came with it, I felt it everywhere, from everyone. It rippled across my skin, like a heat wave I was stuck right in the middle of.

It's what I imagined Hell felt like.

My skin had always felt too tight, just like those jeans Mom always bought me. Always a size smaller than I needed, for motivation, she said.

Really, my mom should be happy about my filthy habit. Those jeans would definitely fit me now. Would probably hang off me now.

I have felt that tickle my whole life that could never be quelled. I never really knew what it was.

Whenever I sat in pews and got caught not listening to Father talk about what makes a good woman, my mom would give me a pinch.

The pinch would hurt, but would be a relief nonetheless. Pain is better than the torturous feeling that is an itch.

My dad would whisper to me to sit up straight, cross my legs like a lady should, and all while barely glancing at me. He always had something more important to look at.

So yeah.

I’ve always felt the urge to scratch. To rip at the skin I was in because that way, maybe, through the spots my skin would peel and bleed at, I would actually be able to fucking breathe.

That wouldn’t be a good look, though.

I heard my mom scolding me for the very thought.

That H though, wow. Bobby’s worried about me now, but I really gotta thank him for introducing it to me. After that small pinch of a needle going in, that feeling of euphoria filling my veins, scratchings gone right away. How can I think about an unbearable itch when I had stepped into a utopia?

The bliss outweighed the formication.

It's when it starts to fade away, the H, that my skin starts to buzz with irritation.

My body rejects itself once again.

Worse than ever before. Now that I know what heaven feels like, I can’t take the itch. I just have to scratch now.

When Bobby tried to suggest rehab, I laughed right in his face.

Because drugs are not my problem.

It's the itchiness. And that, as I’ve said, has always been there.

Now I don’t have mommy and daddy to tell me not to pick at my raw skin or play with the flap of a scar on my arm that won’t heal.

And you know what?

What a fucking relief it is to scratch.

Because I’ve always felt itchy.

Now everyone can see it too.

***

Bobby stops coming to pick me up from the hospital after the third time I end up there. He forced me to change my emergency contact to my mom.

I thought that was him trying to encourage me to stop doing heroin because if I ended up in the hospital again, it would be my mom who would be coming to pick me up.

But it's been two weeks, and he still hasn’t answered my calls. I’m not sure what to make of that.

I don’t think about it for long, though.

One prick of a needle is enough to make me forget.

***

When my mom looked at me with her eyes full of tears this last time, she asked me why I do this to myself, and I got excited.

Because she’s always been so into religion, and now I got to share my savior with her.

I tell her that all those years I spent suffering were for a reason, I see that now.

I’ve found God now, and I’ve been saved.

I tell her I understand now.

I tell her it's like seeing heaven after a lifetime in hell.

I tell her it's transcendence.