I prefer to think of myself as a rational man. I want to think of myself as a person who does not bear a grudge. When someone errs I can learn to understand it, and forgive it. I believe most mistakes to be earnest misunderstandings or brief moments of carelessness, not malice. Oh, this is true most of the time, unless of course you activate my biggest irrational phobia.

Unless one tired night I get ready for bed and fold down the covers to find a pair of scissors glinting its open blades at me, metallically, hungrily. Then, oh wife, you are doomed to years, nay decades, of being reminded of the one time you absentmindedly did that thing. It’s not fair, I know.

To be clear, I did not lie down in bed and accidentally castrate myself, like I imagined. I did not jump into bed and have the scissor points bounce up in the air and puncture my femoral artery, or my kidney. The edge of the scissors did not slip between two fingers and slice at the web spaces, as the tape-loop of my mind constantly plays. You do not think knives and scissors are secretly plotting against you. That is me. This is my dread, not yours. You were merely a fatigued medical resident who opened a package and got distracted; at least you made the bed.

You are not the clumsy handyman who stabs himself with the tiny screwdriver every time you pry out the button battery. It was not you who once trapped your face under the sharp pokey part of a chain link fence. Edward Scissorhands is not your body-horror, but mine. You’re the one who could watch all the way through Dead Again. I am the one who mentally grasps the blade of every knife each time I make a salad, in a loop in some doubly embarrassing space between phobia and fetish. 

It is I who grasps the blade, over and over, and you are the one who gets cut. When my brain loops and snarls, the knife that slices the kink is held facing away, pointing at the closest person to me. 

Forgive me, my love. Forgive me, please, but, also, remember that I am insane, and dearly need you to stop leaving knives in the sink.