Tender Head Wound

When we were bobbing around in the saltwater pool one afternoon, R looked at my forehead gash.

“Oh,” he said pleased, “that seems to be healing quite nicely!”

I felt at the tender spot by my widow’s peak.

I had missed Christmas Day Mass with my father at our old Catholic Church on the hill near the center of town because of it and had hidden from P and her shop because I couldn’t properly cover it with concealer. Months later, it was still tender to the touch.

“Really?” I asked. The Hydroxyzine, Gabapentin, and Florida Sunshine were working against the strident and malicious currents of my anxiety.

“Yeah,” he said, “you can’t really see it much anymore,” he said, inhaling his vape.

I let my feet float above the limestone floor of the pool, my ankles weightless against the cerulean saltwater. The black hole of my heart would ebb and flow, ebb and flow, so I kept a steady cocktail of whatever they prescribed for me at the clinic pumping in my system.

I had woken up sometime in the New Year to a flickering television set and crimson blood against my walls and bedsheets and no recollection of how it had happened. I had only told one friend about it, the one who used to live in the center of a neighboring town before she left. My departure closely followed hers, immensely breaking P’s heart and shattering our Saturday routines.

Today I applied my new electric melon Revlon lipstick and looked upon the area of my forehead where the brutal gash had been. Now it’s vanished. At my job interview yesterday, my (now) manager couldn’t even tell I had had a traumatic head injury.

I told another friend about another new development in my life down here.

“Does that mean you’re staying there for good?” she asked.