🩹 ripping off the bandaid 🩹

“Just rip off the bandage” My mother said when I was five years old with a skinned knee. I didn’t like the feeling so I let the bandaid stay until it fell off painlessly in the pool. “Just rip off the bandage” Said my friend in the fifth grade. She wanted to know who I had a crush on but I didn’t have one and I didn’t know why it was that I never liked boys the way my friends did so I ripped off a bandage that was never there leaving the real one more stuck than it had ever been. “Just rip off the bandage” I said to myself in grade nine when my first and only boyfriend asked to kiss me. That day I ripped off two bandaids in one swipe. I told him that I didn’t feel that way about him and that I could never feel that way about a boy at all. But the thing is, at fifteen, I still hate ripping off bandages as much as I did when I was a kid. I pick and I peel and I wait but I never rip. I don’t like surprises whether they come from other people or from myself. Maybe it would be better to be more transparent; to never put the bandaid on in the first place. Maybe then I would never get hurt at all.