{"id":4504,"date":"2024-06-07T22:17:36","date_gmt":"2024-06-07T22:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/writers-house-review\/?page_id=4504"},"modified":"2025-01-17T20:31:22","modified_gmt":"2025-01-17T20:31:22","slug":"the-itch","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/writers-house-review\/vol-5-winter-2024-2025\/the-itch\/","title":{"rendered":"The Itch"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Rina Gallo<\/em><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

You itch. It\u2019s all you know. It\u2019s all you\u2019ve ever known. It’s all you care to know. You don\u2019t quite know when it started, but it\u2019s here now. Perhaps it\u2019s always existed, lying dormant within you until it found an opportunity to gather up its courage and take its first taste of your skin.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s nowhere, and it\u2019s everywhere. Your hands can never quite seem to find it, but they try, and always return marred by the stinky stench of friction. Their interactions with The Itch create red welts on your skin. The Itch likes the warm, tender spots; it snuggles in them. Your fingernails try to scrape the welts off, which makes way for even redder liquid. The Itch drinks it and migrates. It expands.<\/span><\/p>\n

You repeat the process. You wish that the friction of your nails against skin could create a flame and burn The Itch away. But you are its home. And it refuses to leave.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It has defeated every opponent you throw at it. Countless objects rubbed against your skin in manners inhuman only leave The Itch craving for more red liquid to wash away the taste of those outside objects. Willpower and threatening self-commands to not touch or scratch or even pat gives The Itch an easier time of consuming your skin. Taking the opposite approach of distraction ends even more horribly since somehow every thought, no matter how outlandish, seems to return to The Itch, which holds a gravity that even non-matter phenomena like imagination are drawn towards. And in the moments where your brain finally does take a break from the burden of The Itch, it tightens its grip on you once more.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Doctors, pills, and ointments set it down for a nap, but like every needy infant, The Itch soon wakes up crying louder than before, dependent on the prescription to quell it. You are only tolerant of one foreign substance inhabiting your body for an extended period of time, so you send the troops away and let The Itch be the ruler of its terrain.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You don\u2019t bother to talk about The Itch to family or friends, though even interactions with strangers leave you tempted to utter its name from your lips. All remedies have been tested and failed, and you no longer have the energy to listen to the advice of others. You haven\u2019t considered therapy, and while that\u2019s what they tell you to do, you refuse to let yourself listen to them. You don\u2019t want to. Clearly, they\u2019ve stopped believing that The Itch is real. But it is. And it\u2019s all you can hear.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It grows an ego, abandons its desperate need to cling to you in every moment by taking occasional vacations, allowing itself respite before it comes back in stronger waves than before and covers a wider expanse of your body as it grows bored with exposed surfaces and ventures inward, digging deeper into your skin. You know better than to breathe freely in the moments its tickle lightens, too afraid to touch any part of you that it has claimed. Not thinking about The Itch is its own form of giving it attention, and whether you call its name or not, it always comes running back, quicker with the growing frequency of your avoidance. Your loyal companion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019ve given up on trying to get it to go; no amount of negotiation could lessen its devotion to you and your body. <\/span>Learn to live with it<\/span><\/i> has become the new motto, what you\u2019ve been hearing from the voices around you even after you decided to stop broaching the subject. You are not doing this to listen to those voices, though. You are doing this for you. For The Itch.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As you embark on the journey of accepting The Itch, you realize there is not much learning involved in the process, no matter what the motto says. You live with The Itch now. You always have. It\u2019s all you\u2019ve known. It\u2019s all you will ever know.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Rina Gallo<\/strong> is an English Major from Holmdel, New Jersey. She has a double minor in PPE (Philosophy, Politics, Economics) and Business Administration, and she is in the Class of 2025. Her publications include the poem \u201cNature Spreading Knowledge,\u201d featured in the America Library Of Poetry\u2019s 2019 Compilation; <\/span>Illustrious; <\/span><\/i>and the novel <\/span>The Heart of a Rock, <\/span><\/i>which won the Scholastic Arts and Writing Gold Key Award in 2021. Most recently, her essay \u201cMovies, Music, and Their Significance to Culture Demonstrated Through \u2018Looney Tunes\u2019 and \u2018The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down\u2019\u201d won the James Suydam prize in English Composition, and her poem \u201cLove is Pain\u201d was published by WILDsound Writing Festival as part of their Festival for Poetry.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rina Gallo   You itch. It\u2019s all you know. It\u2019s all you\u2019ve ever known. It’s all you care to know. You don\u2019t quite know when it started, but it\u2019s here … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2513,"featured_media":0,"parent":4318,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4504","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Itch - Writers House Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/writers-house-review\/vol-5-winter-2024-2025\/the-itch\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Itch - Writers House Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Rina Gallo   You itch. It\u2019s all you know. It\u2019s all you\u2019ve ever known. It’s all you care to know. 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