CLIX. Non-Sticky Bandages -

Bandages, better known as Band-AIDS, are meant to be ripped off. The act of using your fingernails to detach the ends from your skin once a dry scab has formed is unpleasant, but it is also necessary. It’s like pulling off the sticky price-tag on something you’re gifting. Ideally a band-AID should be time-sensitive: Be sticky enough to let blood-clotting work it’s magic and keep out infection, and be non-adhesive enough to come off easily without the finagling of having to scrape off the leftover glue from your skin, only to then apply bandages when the aforementioned scratching is no doubt unsuccessful.

Unfortunately for us, bandages are like what sticky notes, better known as Post-It’s, should be. That is to say, they stick to you at their own discretion instead of eventually falling off. As a result, our hair is pulled out from their follicles and our skin is stretched so that both males and females feel that wrath of a localized pregnancy. In other words, the stretching of your skin as you try in vain to peel off a particularly stubborn bandage.

Therein, someone somewhere has coined the analogy, “rip it off like a band-AID,” which does well to insinuate that despite any hesitancy we have in pursuing a task, we’re to do it anyway. Might as well get it over and done with.

What lies beneath the bandage is a sign of both trauma and healing. After all, bodily trauma ignites an inflammation stage that triggers the blood-clotting process - for the non-hemophiliac population that is.
A hemophiliac is someone who inherited the genetic mutation which prevents blood from clotting.

Not too long ago I was cutting up my daily evening snack of a 6-pound (or more) watermelon. The knife slipped and I did not know that I had cut my finger because I didn’t feel any pain initially and it was not until I saw the blood seeping out that I realized I had been cut. The blood kept seeping and it wouldn’t stop. Hemophilia was not the cause and I presumed stitches were necessary. With 25 minutes until one of NYC’s last remaining open Urgent Care centers was closing and with hopes to dodge the ER, I got to the center with 5 minutes to spare.

I didn’t need stitches, but the cut was deep enough to warrant a never ending stream of bright red fluid so uncannily reminiscent of the sweet, product of summer-melon.

I ripped off my bandage the next day- always impatient with having a foreign object wedged between the tactility of my fingertips and the world around me. What remained was a gaping cut that didn’t close up for another 10 days so that I felt a dull pain with every encounter the wound made with the elements.

I ripped off the bandage and yet there was no calming effect or one-button recovery as the analogy had promised.

Recovery isn’t a fast-track. It’s tough and goes beyond the physical. It’s counter-intuitive and contradictory. It’s seemingly courageous but also seemingly cowardly. It’s an alliteration of the letter c because it is so comparable.

It’s crappy and not at all dissimilar to my city’s brainchild: the cronut - it’s ridiculous but appealing.

The hybrid confection of croissant and donut is something that is crazy, but is just crazy enough to work.

Recovery from anything is a science. Scientifically speaking, it’s crazy that the process of recovery is riddled with its own set of problems and yet eventually is the only proven path to attain the coveted outcome - and in my case, that is to gain weight.

It’s so ‘cronut’ to me that I have to eat despite not feeling hungry. It’s so cronut to me that I have to feel gluttonous and feel as though my belly has expanded beyond capacity and yet everyone else sees scrawny arms and spoke-like shoulder blades jutting out. It is so cronut to me that I am constipated at all times and in an attempt to rid myself of this fullness by pacing around my house, I’m actually delaying any recovery from occurring.

I’m stuck between a coagulated rock of sugar and a hard shell of a donut that has hidden inside a buttery soft croissant; that is to say, I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place, better known as: The “cronut.”