I've had this cut on my finger for a while that's been nagging my attention. Just when I touch or lift something, making direct contact with a little spot on the skin that's a bit raw, even though it's been weeks since the wound struck. I think weeks. Maybe less. More than one week, some odd days onto that.
They poked me with a tiny pricker to measure my iron level at the blood donation center. I'm usually torn about which finger to give them - those on the left hand are necessary to form chords on the guitar, and those on the right to manipulate pens and pencils. The young, hungover-ish individuals working the facility never seem to have the patience to let me deliberate so I just offer whatever finger they seem to be looking at. It's usually the middle finger of the left hand. That's the finger that's sore right now.
The way it nags my attention is somewhat unorthodox - first of all, it's sporadic, as in, only when I touch or lift something (or when I look at it and see the tiny dot, which was at first scabby and red and is now scar-tissue white [I understand that this listing of conditions actually implies a pattern - far from sporadic - but I'm kind of talking memory here, as in, I forget the rules for pain, so it seems sporadic]). Secondly it nags my attention by sporadically forcing me to reflect on the very sporadic-ness of the pain itself. It's only when I touch something directly on that little part of the fingertip that it hurts. When I do, there's a moment of confusion - at first I don't recall why I feel this odd, tiny spot of discomfort. Instinct usually tells me something on the surface of whatever object I've got is pointy or sharp, that I'm not feeling the burn of an old wound, but the formation of a new one. After four or five milliseconds of that false reckoning, I remember: they pricked me. They pricked me because I was going to donate blood. And it's healing slowly because I haven't been eating and living well.
Then I think about the little soreness I feel when I listen to certain songs, or watch certain movies, or talk about certain books, or walk along certain paths, where for a moment my brain can't place the pain - it thinks, for four or five milliseconds, that the injury is new, that whatever stimuli has struck me as sad did so for whatever reason, with no regard of the past. But then I remember: this song makes me think of a moment with someone. This movie, I watched with someone. I talked about this book with someone. Someone and I walked along this path. The someones can all be different, they often are, but whoever it was there was a definite moment, whether I knew it or not, that I had made myself vulnerable to this someone, and that shared moment pricked me somewhere between my brain stem and frontal lobe, and the wound remained a bit raw.
That's what's been nagging me, really, the finger and the brain and how they won't stop behaving this way. I have two choices with my finger. I can keep touching and lifting things and go through the whole ordeal of pain and memory, until if and when it heals enough, or I can stop touching and lifting things entirely. Which would require a level of tactile abstinence close to suicide. Anyway, it was probably best that I gave the blood in the first place, stubborn prick and all.
