Anticipating nostalgia for the cut on my hand

While I was helping Natalie move out of her dorm room last Thursday, I got a cut on my hand. We were in a rush to get her on a train, then I had to get to Boston to have lunch with Leslie, so I just shrugged it off and kept going. Of course I never cleaned it or put any kind of stuff on it. Over the next few days it didn't get much better, it got red and sore, and by the time I was driving south with her Saturday and Sunday it was totally bugging me.

When I got home to NC, I put some hydrogen peroxide and then bacytracin on it, and covered it with a bandaid, and it has been getting better. Which is nice. On the one hand, I want it to get better. On the other, I have this somewhat morbid interest in it, I keep wanting to check it out and see how much it has progressed over the last 12 hours.

But the irony is, and this is pretty typical of these kinds of little boo boos, that I kind of don't really want it to get better. I'm glad it has stopped hurting, and I am academically interested in its progress, and I don't relish the process of putting the bandaids on it, but somewhere in me there's a resistance to letting go of it. Maybe it's a mild baby tendency, the fact that I can feign injury for certain tasks, even if I haven't figured out what they are. And I've had this feeling before.