I am a wound. My body is a patch work of cuts and scabs. The skin dying and peeling only to be replaced by new skin that turns out to be just as shitty. Skin so dry it cracks. Small but abundant open gashes are scattered around the skin and burns at the gentlest touch. The assortment of swells and spots are grotesque to the eye and painful. The medical ointment or cream that is ‘hypoallergenic’ is almost never a luxury like it claims to be. ’Quick and long lasting relief,’ ’makes skin soft and smooth,’ ‘clinically proven to improve sensitive skin.’ Bullshit. I am still an open wound.

Past the cuts and the scrapes, there’s me. Almost just as broken and torn. At night when there is only half consciousness, I itch for that painful relief. Scratching leaves an agonising bliss that soothes but burns. It is pure desperation. Rational thought screams that I will pay for this in the morning when I will wake up to blood soaked bed sheets and red skin that will hurt and restrain movement. It will deprive me of my freedom to move. It is during night when my self-control falters and the sibilant sound of nails scraping skin starts. I feel like tearing myself apart and sometimes I cry. But that’s even worse because tears carry salt, and it burns the skin as it trails down my cheek. The girl inside me wants to give up.

I wake up feeling filthy. There is blood, there is shed skin and there are the memories of thrashing around in bed. The skin is raw and red and though I caress it gently, it refuses to register my touch as comforting. The ‘dermatologically recommended’ moisturiser does not ‘instantly relieve’ me but instead burns me. I let it burn for a tormenting ten minutes and then wait for it to become numb. Even then I cannot relax because I have become fragile. Skin so delicate it threatens to tear. I can no longer move freely and I don’t want to face myself in the mirror. I wake up every morning dreading my reflection in the mirror. I dread facing the world because how could they bear to look at me. No one likes looking at a wound. A wound is disgusting. A wound is ugly. I am a wound.

The un-healing wound walks around, receiving worried glances or grimaces. The common question: what’s wrong with you? It is not so much of what’s wrong with me, it’s what type of obstacle life has chosen I have to overcome. I put up with the insults and the stares because they are a side effect of eczema. Diseases never let you forget they’re there. They hurt you and torture you and cause people to stare to remind you that you have become the person who has ‘something wrong with them.’ Eczema the captor and the tormentor. It is not fatal and it will let me live, but it deprives me of fully living. I cannot do many things without affecting my skin which is more than a little annoying. Life chooses what my battles are and though this is not the worst out there, it is cruelty to me. I have to live a life without the pleasant simplicities that are taken for granted. I cannot cry when I want, nor can I swim when I want. Bathing hurts me and even my sleep is hindered and haunted by it. Also, I am deprived of love. I am a wound that will never heal…and who could ever love a wound?