I’ve been waging a war against my hands since I was eleven years old, but try as I might, I cannot gnaw them off. The knuckles are swollen, callused from years of being torn at, as if they were a morsel of chicken whose only purpose is to part from the bone, and there is a scar on the back of my hand that I used to cover with my wristwatch and still occasionally try to forget, but from beneath its bandage or watch or bracelet it calls to me, "chew me, bite me, take the whole hand right off."
 
No, maybe it was before I was eleven. I remember picking at my fingertips at a much younger age. My earliest memory of it—maybe, now that I think about it, my earliest memory of all—was walking through Euclid Square Mall, holding hands with my father, my fingers agitating in his grip, trying to claw one another into submission, to become the dominant finger on a weak hand. It wasn’t the nails that I was going after—my father trimmed my nails too short on purpose when he began to notice what I was doing—but the skin around the nails, to the left on the left hand, right on the right, a fan of stabbing and poking that radiated out from my thumbs, which received the brunt of the attack. But I know the biting came later.

 Between the clawing and the biting came the jabbing of the skin beneath the nails. Not all the nails, just the thumbs and the pinkies. The left thumb was first, then the right; the pinkies came much later, in college, but the thumbs I started early, and it shows, the white of the nail dipping down like an unexpected undertow in calm, sunset-washed waters, forming a grotesque ‘S.’ I don’t know what started it—I was very small, things started themselves; problems in the small are highly self-motivated—but I know it became a habit very fast, the quick sharp stabs with the edge of a fresh piece of paper into the flesh beneath the nail, then the pencil tip, then the staple, then the occasional tack left unguarded by a teacher in an unkempt bulletin board, until the tips of my nails were stained as pink as the flesh beneath them with blood. I’ve tried everything I can to stop. I’ve cut the nails down to the quick until they bleed again, filled the gaping mouths of callused flesh with super glue, hoping to quell their hunger for paper and metal, but at night, when I forget, my hands cry out in pain for pain, and when I wake in the morning the satin edge of my blanket is folded neatly under my nail, burrowing deeper.

 It’s the biting that most people notice. Dead flesh, casualties of my war against my cuticles, can be snipped away with a pair of nail clippers, and nails can be painted. But the thick scar tissue that rests over my knuckles and the back of my wrist, like rolls of fat on the waist of an old woman, cannot be disguised. The scars on the knuckles of my index fingers look like warts, and I try to pass them off as such. But there is no explanation for the thick brown lump on my wrist. I usually just cover it with my hand during summer and pray for the time when long sleeved shirts will again become fashionable.

 I know exactly when I started the biting, but to this day I still can’t tell you why. I was in band in the fifth grade, fourth period of an eight period day. Practice was over and we replacing our instruments in their dank, gum-lined cages when I noticed Thaddeus’ hands. Thaddeus was a little guy who looked a lot like Ringo Starr, his nose promenading proudly before him as he walked, and he often came to school in his Boy Scout uniform. The sporting of these uniforms by my classmates always inspired a twinge of jealousy in me; I had been a Brownie for two hours before dropping out, with only a sit-upon to prove I had been there at all. I would never have such a uniform, and for them to wear theirs in front of me seemed like a slap in the face delivered by the unflinching hand of Scout honor. Thaddeus went on to become an Eagle Scout our senior year in high school; he also went on to devise a crude bomb with which he and his best friend blew up a construction truck in the most expensive neighborhood in our town. But I didn’t know any of this then. I only knew that Thaddeus had the greatest hands I had ever seen.

 "How did your knuckles get like that?" I asked as I slid my trombone into its sepulcher. His instrument cage was below mine, and he locked it before standing up to look at me.

 "Like what?" He inspected his hands as I had seen countless ladies in Palmolive commercials do, marveling at the magic the soap had worked upon her.

 "The knuckles. How did they get like that?" His knuckles were swollen and dry, looking more like a shell than the wrinkled elephant flesh of my own hands.

 He brought the knuckles up to his face, working them like industrious worms. "I don’t know. But they’re kind of cool, huh?"

 I nodded. Everything that didn’t look like me was superior in my view.

 "Look what they can do." Holding his index finger uncomfortably close to my face, causing me to go cross-eyed, he pinched the edges of his knuckle together, causing them to peak into a mountainous ridge. "It’s stay like that until I squash it down. See?" He lowered the tip of his other index finger onto the knuckle slowly, like a reluctant president hesitating over The Button.

 I squeezed the edges of my own knuckle together. They came together half-heartedly, forming a whining mouth that disappeared as soon as I took my finger and thumb away. Thaddeus watched this pathetic display, shrugged his shoulders, and trotted away, leaving me staring at my own, vastly inferior hands.

 That night I found myself inspecting my hands again under the bright light of my bedroom lamp. Why didn’t my hands know this trick? The knuckles on each finger lay prone, the ragged, jiggling jowls of fat old men. Like the rest of me, they were unimpressive. I brought the knuckle of my left hand to my mouth and inserted it, sucking the day’s salt from its wrinkles. And then, for no reason, and unexpectedly, I bit down, grinding the skin like tough chicken between my freshly grown adult teeth. The knuckle on the index finger of my right hand came later, but not too much later. And soon, they both rose up in fine foothill form when pinched. Except they would not go back down, and they haven’t since then.

 I wish I could say the reason I bite the back of my wrist was better. I wish I could say it was from nerves, or even a mental disease—tourette’s, maybe. But as far as I know it originated out of sheer sixth-grade boredom. My knuckles were exhausted by this time, but my jaw needed to work itself, and the spot just to the left of center on my right wrist seemed like as good a place as any. I did this for a long time before I was caught; how I managed to avoid the attention of my teachers or classmates while bringing my wrist to my mouth and gnawing at it as a mangy dog mines for fleas I have no idea. But I was caught eventually, in seventh grade math, during an unfortunate bout of group work. My partner looked up from his paper to find me with my wrist to my mouth and frowned.

"You look like you’re giving yourself a hickey," he said. I had no idea what a hickey was, then. But it sounded horrible, so I covered the scar with my wristwatch and didn’t touch it again until my sophomore year of college, when one day it called to me "I am healed. Do you like that? I am healed flat. It’s like you never touched me. Do you like that?" I did not, and now it rises like the knuckles rise, brown and angry like a migrant worker.

The scars on my knuckles and wrist disgust me. I have tried to remove them, with nail clippers, with callus removers, with scissors and scalpels, but I have been told that they are covered in scar tissue now, tissue that will never rejuvenate itself. So I might as well keep on chewing.
 

Some pain doesn’t hurt.

Some pain, like the pain I feel when my carve into the skin beneath my nails or remove a layer of dead skin from my knuckles with my teeth, doesn’t hurt at all, just resonates through me, lingering pleasantly like a former enemy with whom I’ve made peace. Some pain feels good. It’s the scars that cause the problems. People notice the scars. People ask about them. And generally, people don’t understand how you got them in the first place.

The scar of which I am most ashamed rests atop my dresser, far away but always inside me, always with me, as brown and angry as the welt on the back of my wrist. A bottle of Prozac, a scar from inner pain.

I have suffered from depression for as long as I have picked my nails, dug at them. It has been a part of my life for so long that I don’t notice it any more; it is dull, a vague dissatisfaction with the way things are going, nothing more. And when I cry, when I allow myself to shred my own soul they way I allow my teeth to attack the senseless elephants of my knuckles, it hurts. But at the same time, it feels good, the ghost of a violently killed friend come to call.

It should have been so easy to hide. My mother suffers from depression, and her sister, and their mother, and all this time I never knew, until one day without warning I joined their elite group and it became obvious, the crying over the kitchen sink, the mouse-red eyes before school, the persistent sigh. I saw these things and didn’t see them until one day my heart, as my hands had done before it, invited me to attack it.

Sometimes, pain feels good.

But depression, too, carries its own scar, the ubiquitous bottle that follows you from prom to marriage to baby’s first steps. Prozac is for those who cannot cope, who need to be regulated, medicated like bad dogs. I never tell anyone about my green and yellow companions unless I’ve known them forever, or I if I have to. Doctors handle me like a fragile honeycomb swarming with bees when they see it on my chart, and people who read about it in my work, when I put it in my work, whisper their condolences to me on their way out. Sometimes I lie; I tell people they’re for migraines, or for weight loss, but then they ask more questions—I never knew you had migraines—and then I have to change the subject with another lie, but they don’t forget what they have seen. It burns them like it burns me, a stigma, or a dinner conversation topic: I have a friend who takes Prozac. I try to hide the bottle, but when I do, I forget about it and don’t take it. So it sits out in plain view of all, drawing attention to itself on a dresser covered with tall, lithe toiletries, short and squat, a tanned troll. It is a scar that cannot be disguised.

When people see it, and they invariably see it, they want to ask questions. How long? Six years. But I always seem so happy. I imagine myself as a rotting pumpkin in the eyes of these people, still robust and bright on the outside, cankerous and black inside. It almost seems to make people angry when they find out. How could I have fooled them?

It was easy. I fooled everyone, I fooled you all and it was so easy. Depression is like a small piece of glass, too small to mistake for dangerous, but capable of drawing blood. And I always had it with me, under my tongue; but I learned quickly that no one will kiss someone with glass in their mouth, afraid of the sting and the taste of blood, brassy, like the trombone I put away so many years ago. So I wrap it gently in a piece of wool, a morsel of chocolate, something appealing—a joke—and suddenly it is warm and inviting, benign. Humor is the wool I use to soften the depression, and there are times when it is buried so deeply in the fog-white gauze that I myself forget it’s there.

Until the day I wake up shaking, every hair on my body standing on end, unable to close my eyes and unable to open them, nauseated with fear. There are no jokes then to fall back on, only tears and choking and muted sobs, like the bark of a dog being jerked along on a very short chain. There is no hiding from times like these—times which, thankfully, do not come often—but only… nothing, a blank, scratched chalkboard, a grape stomped dry of juice. I call off work, off school, I lie, I tell the truth, depending to whom I speak. But everyone knows. My voice shakes. I haven’t eaten for three weeks. They know. And it’s then I go back to the bottle.

I try to chew the bottle off. I go months without touching it, throw it in a drawer, forget about it. You see, I tell it, I am healed over flat. It’s like you never touched me. And sometimes it works; sometimes I go weeks, months, even, without anything. There is still the wool, but the glass has been smoothed down, like a pebble in the ocean, a presence but not a threat. Look at me, doctors, look at me, friends, everyone, everyone who said depression cannot be beaten! But then I find myself crying over misplaced car keys, or hitting myself with in the head with the telephone receiver as I wait desperately to be put in contact with my mother, and I bring it out again. It is scar tissue now. It cannot be gnawed off.
 

I know a man who has a scar on the back of his right wrist, the exact same scar as mine. I noticed it one day as we talked—I notice all scars, especially on hands—and cannot help but stare at it each time we meet. It is smaller than mine, obviously older, but still there, brown and pinched against the whiteness of his skin. I’m dying to ask him about it—are its origins anything like mine? Is there someone else who has tried to kill their own hands before their own hands try to kill them?

But I will never ask him. Not because I’m afraid to find that he has the same problems as me—no, that would be welcome—but that I would find that his scar is nothing like mine at all, the result of a cigarette burn or a childhood scrape. I’m afraid to find out that no one is like me, that no one has the same problems as me. I’m afraid to find out that my scars are the result of psychosis, not simple physical mishaps. I’m afraid to find out that I do indeed need to be regulated.

I imagine myself asking him about the scar and him covering it instinctively with his hand, as I have always done. He tells me that he bites it, just that spot, and he doesn’t know why. I show him my scar. We know it. Sometimes pain feels good.

 But I can’t ask him, I refuse. It is his scar; it speaks only to him, and he is the only one who understands it.