Page 27 of In This Iron Ground
“That’s okay, Damien, don’t worry about that. Can you tell me why you were at the nurse’s?”
“I, ah, I scratched myself.”
“Accidentally, or was it like just now when you were scratching your arms?”
Damien paused. His hand in Mia’s twitched with the urge to scratch. “Like…like now,” Damien said, so softly that he feared Sam wouldn’t be able to hear him, but she nodded.
“Do you do that often? Say, in the past week, how often do you think you’ve scratched at your arms?”
“I…I don’t know. I haven’t done it much since…” He had to take gulps of air, suddenly, but Mia’s hand around his anchored him. “Since I started going to Mia’s.”
Sam nodded and gave them both a small smile. “Is it okay if I see your arms?”
Damien hesitated but slowly flipped his arms over, exposing the scratched skin on the underbelly. His heart raced as he caught sight of where the ropes had left ugly scabs and bruising. He hadn’t realized they had taken his makeshift bandages off, and he’d barely looked at the rope-burns then. Sam leaned forwards, looking for a moment, before nodding and leaning back.
“Thanks for showing me, Damien. Didn’t the nurse ask about them?”
Damien’s muscles loosened slightly when she didn’t mention his wrists, tucking his arm in again. “I lied, told her it was poison ivy.”
Sam hummed noncommittally. “Thinking on your feet?”
“Um…yeah, I guess.”
“Has anybody else said anything about the scratches?”
“No. But, I haven’t done it lately.”
“When do you find you do it more? Like, do you do it when you’re kicking back watching TV, or when you’re around people, or when you’re thinking about something in particular…?”
Damien twitched. Answering that question was like peering into the darkness, like squinting your eyes and straining your ears and focusing all your body to reveal what was hidden in the depths.
“I don’t know,” he whispered, but silence stretched after him, expecting. “When…when I feel…it’s like I don’t want to be in my head anymore. Like, there’s too much in there and it’s all bad and my skin will start itching. I want to getoutbut I, I can’t and it’s, it’s like there’s this one thing keeping me tied, that keeps me from, like, from disappearing inside, where all that stuff is,” Damien blurted out in almost one breath. There was a silence.
“That sounds very difficult, Damien. It’s understandable why you would want to scratch your arms, feeling like that. It’s not good for you, in more ways than you realize, but that doesn’t mean you should be ashamed of trying to find a way to keep yourself from…disappearing,” Sam said.
Damien couldn’t meet her eyes. He shrugged.
“Thank you for telling me. You mentioned that you haven’t done it as much since you met Mia. Does that mean that you haven’t felt like that as much since you met her?”
Damien stopped, actually giving the question thought. Mia’s hand felt secure around his.
“I…I still feel that way but…” Damien trailed off, thinking of a way to explain it. “It’s like a pressure cooker, or something. I still feel that way, but when I’m at Mia’s, with Hakan and Koko and everybody, it’s like the pressure goes down, so even when that happens, when everything gets all loud and fast inside, it’s not as bad so I don’t have to…I don’t feel as itchy,” Damien finished lamely, but Sam made a noise of understanding.
“Have you ever done anything else when you’re feeling like that? Have you ever hurt yourself or thought of hurting yourself?”
“No,” Damien said quickly. Probably too quickly by the look on Sam’s face when he glanced at her. “Seriously. No, I haven’t,” he said, more firmly this time. He turned momentarily to Mia, as if she could verify the truthfulness of the statement, but she just smiled and squeezed his hand.
“I believe you Damien, don’t worry,” Sam said. Then, with the same straightforwardness, “And about suicide? Had you thought about it before?”
The words fell like an anvil on Damien.Suicide. He hadn’t even remotely applied that term to himself. Suicide was what other people did. Heads in ovens and freefalls from bridges. Women in bathtubs with a cigarette in their mouth,goodbye cruel world.
It hit Damien, then. What he had done, or tried to do. It spun around him in panoramic view. He had tried to kill himself. It wasn’t sleep, it wasn’t a rest, or a solution. It wasn’t anythingbetter, wasn’t even nothingness. It was death.
Damien could feel his chest compress. He ripped his hand from Mia’s, covering his face with both of them, spiralling.
“No.” The word was ripped out of him slowly, not a response, but a plea.
Someone was holding his wrists, then, below where his raw skin was, and then Mia’s voice from beyond the wall of his forearms, “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay, Damien. Breathe. I’m with you. I’m with you,” the voice was saying, kept saying. It washed over him, filled his lungs to capacity.
