When I was six, I used to play with the kids in my small cul-de-sac, riding bikes, chasing each other, playing hide and seek behind the trees that were like giants to us. I remember on a hot and sticky August day, I fell and skinned my knee, and it was the most unbearable pain. I cried, and the sting of the Neosporin disinfectant made me yelp and scream, but my mom’s hug after the bandage was placed made all of the pain dissipate.

When I was sixteen, a fell in love with a boy that eventually ripped my heart straight out from my chest, breaking ribs in the process. He stomped on it, kicked it, and punched it with all of his might. He tore it into tiny pieces, letting the February wind carry it away in fragments, getting lost and scattered to places where it would never be recovered. But his last and final wound was an “I don’t love you anymore”, said into the wind chasing the pieces of my heart, perpetually marked on the now dark burgundy colored bits of the flesh. I ran home, passing the exact spot where I skinned my knee when I was six. I hugged my mom hello, hoping that it would give me the same comfort and healing powers as it did when I was little, but I still felt the same, and wished I didn’t.