The Scar

Can't see it?
Here is what it used to look like, kinda.


So the story behind this is one of sadness and despair. Or maybe not. Perhaps about unintentional wounding and then healing.

In any case, I used to date this guy, James.


We broke up, but kept hanging out (and sleeping together) for like...a year. He got new girls, but routinely would call my house at 3-5am and ask if I was up and could he come over. (Sad, right? But he was hot and the sex was usually worth it.) One night, in the summer of 2006, he called me, said he was coming over. I went back to sleep, because I don't have time for that shit. He called an hour later, said he'd wrecked his bike outside of the Congress Theater (kinda near my house) and could I come pick him up?

I'm like, walk dude, I don't have a car, how the fuck am I going to pick you up? It was pouring rain, but that still doesn't change the fact that I'm sleeping and I didn't ask for this nonsense to begin with, so I go back to sleep.
....
....
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
The buzzer.

He limps into my apartment, soaking wet and walks his bike into my kitchen. His shoe is half-way off and one foot is swollen. He keeps whining about how much it hurts, and I tell him to suck it up and help him strip naked out of his wet clothes (yay-yah). The chain had come off of his fixed gear (of course, fucking hipster), so we flipped it upside down to put it back on. My apartment's fucking tiny, so the bike was standing in my kitchen, I was near it not facing it, and he opens the fridge to get a beer and the bike collides into me, the exposed single gear digging into the flesh on the back of my calf.

Like this, but the off the chain


There was a lot of blood. James showed me this wound on his knee from another drunken bike accident, where he'd made the mistake of using cotton balls to stop the bleeding. His knee was a mess of pink tissue with lumps in it where the skin had healed over the bits of stuck cotton. Gross. So I used a gauze pad from my first aid kit.

It got infected, and required new gauze pads twice daily. Pretty gnarly.

Turns out James' foot was broken. I felt kinda bad for making fun of him.

Anyway, we're still close, I think he's the last person I've slept with. Heh. I've accepted the fact that we'll never be together the way we were when we dated, and forgiven him for the fucked up shit that he's done. Those scars have healed, too.
In any case, he still makes a nice late-night friend.