There is a pale white streak that mars the breadth of my arm, that cuts across blank and flawless skin, that marks its place with unmistakable thinness, stretched taut and firm over shifting muscle and aching bone.
I do not know how it got there. I do not know what blood shed, what pink flesh tore, what skin split for this delicate spider-silk contraption to stretch over a shredded limb and make it whole again.
But what I do know is I itch. And it is within this- this thing that crawls and weeps its silver tears across my arm that I know this itch- belongs to it.
I do not own this wretched thing. Oh, yes, it was weaved from my unlucky flesh and it has been rendered from my flowing blood, pale as milk... but foreign as the bones within your body which you never hope to see.
It is not mine. I did not wish it there. And I did not wish this maddening itch- this sensation which I cannot release, cannot abate, cannot crush- upon myself.
They cannot see it. Is it not there? Is it not obvious? How it consumes me, how, it, born from my own body, betrays its unwilling master? How it torments me with its hateful desire to devour?
Surely it must be obvious. How it dares to sap my lifeblood from me, it dares to curse my once-smooth limb with weak and frail flesh. It is a healing cancer that I claw at with dulled nails and poisoned fervor, and it itches.
It- it must be something in there. It is the truth of what I see, contained beneath this fabrication of my flesh, beneath this artificial hide that mocks the liveliness of my limb. It is my lifeblood, pumping its desperation against this deception, this imitation, this forgery, to save itself and show me the truth of my being. That I am not this alien creation that has stretched its cursed self across my skin. This crimson waterfall of me- it is mine, and only mine, to free.
I don't think I feel that itch anymore.
