paper cut.

The first thing I learned when I was born was to tough it out. Not to be tough. Just to tough it out. There’s a difference. God, there’s a difference.

The world is unfair, I learned. The world hurts sometimes. The world is, ultimately, forgiving, and eventually all tends to work itself out.

And so we tough it out.

The second thing I learned was to wait.

Life has a way of coming back to us, if only we can see it through. Everything has a way of coming full-circle. Karma, some call that. But even a broken clock is right twice a day, say others.

And so we wait.

The third thing I learned was to disappear.

Like a rabbit, skittish and silent through the trees behind my parents’ house. Like a playing card, hidden up a magician’s sleeve. Like a snowflake caught on the end of a child’s mitten.

And so we disappear, so extraordinarily well that we can’t even see ourselves in the mirror when we look back to make sure no one’s seen us go.

___

I played with paper dolls when I was young. I had a big book of them, the kind you can’t really find anymore. The kind that I come across sometimes in antique shops or museum gift stores and that cost way more than the original $2 printed price tag on the back of them. The kind that were probably pretty sexist and all kinds of problematic, with big skirts and precisely cut pant legs and tiny little accessories that would tear just from looking at them wrong.

I used to cut them out with so much care and such tiny scissors that my hands would cramp and my eyes would cross. I would fold over the little tags that there were never enough of and that were never strong enough, and I’d hold them tight to the cardstock bodies that came with them, lithe and dressed already in their best underwear. I used to think that was scandalous, something grown-up, these little paper dolls with their bare bellies and petticoats and boxer briefs. I cut out their clothes for them as fast and as carefully as I could, the better and faster to cover them and make them whole.

___

There was a shoebox full of beads in my house that I found when I was ten. I was looking for something else, or at least I was in the version of this story that I tell myself. The story itself isn’t important, really. Or the truth of the story isn’t, rather.

(That’s something else I tell myself.)

But there was a box of beads, and I did find it one day amidst the rest of the art supplies, the paint and the big pads of watercolor paper I wouldn’t really know how to use for a few more years, and when I picked up the box, it rattled like a reliquary and I loved it.

They were simple, balls of painted wood in bright colors. They were cheap, not all of them drilled all the way through.

I’d sit on the floor in the living room with the beads and bundles of string, and I’d poke through their seals of frayed pine with my father’s awl or the end of a stretched-out paperclip. I’d string and string and string endless strands for everything and nothing at all – I was the fastest beader, and each bead was another chance to be faster at creating useless things. I was racing something. The end of the string. Or the number of beads in the box. The velocity with which the paperclip shot through the end of each sealed-over bead.

One day I poked at one blocked end jab jab jabbing at the wood, jab jab jabbing like I’d done dozens of times before, jab jab jabbing like a woodpecker at a birch burl until it broke through with a whoosh and a crack –

There was no blood (sometimes I think I remember blood), but it felt like there should have been, and when I looked at my hand there was a little hole sitting in the center of my fingertip, right there in the middle of my pointer, straight out the other side (I could see the little dark spot where it must have hit the underside of my nail and stopped).

I didn’t cry, I thought I should have been crying, but all I could do was stare at my finger where the paperclip went through and wonder how it had happened. I remember not wanting to tell my mother what I’d done. I remember being home alone and not being able to tell my mother what I’d done. I remember that when she got home an hour later and I thought about telling her what I’d done, I looked down at my hand and there was no hole after all. There was no scar. There was no little dark spot underneath my nail.

The whole thing was a ghost.

The whole thing was a disappearance.

The whole thing was just a story that I had told myself.

Sometimes, when I look at my hand – seventeen years later – I still see a hole there. I’m still not convinced that it was just a story. I’m still not convinced that I’m not a ghost, and that paperclip just passed right through without a care in the world.