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Every once in a while, I get small painful bumps on my scalp, often on either the left or right lower side of my head, behind my ears. They come in delayed pairs, although on occasion I’ve gotten three at once. I don’t know what causes them – I have a vague and shaky theory about maybe the stem ends of my glasses? – but they hurt very much when touched, which happens when I comb my hair, or run my fingers through it to put it in a ponytail or bun.

I’m incapable of leaving a single protruding blemish on my person untouched, so often I will rub at this bump, squeeze it gently and sometimes roughly and feel the enormously shameful and blood-rushed pleasure of making it pop. There is a sick pleasure in the gross slickness of whatever oily residue comes out of the bump, and with the tips of my fingers I rub it back into my scalp, this tiny massage, this tiny reabsorbing into my head, my hair, my brain. It scabs over and the process begins again. This week the bump is lower down on the left side of my head, just to the west of where I do a centre part when I braid my hair in pigtails.

My head and all its immediate attachments fascinate me. I’m prone to playing with my earlobes, rubbing the back of my ears, tugging the roots of my hair, scratching flaky dry spots on my scalp and watching the dandruff snow. I could talk about the various bits of my face I touch and dirty with my constantly picking fingers, but that might be enough for a whole other post. Maybe this is why I dream up tattoos so close to this fascinating landscape, this mysterious, unsighted terrain.

Once in primary school, as I sat on the concrete bleachers on our school field, I scratched my head and found a relatively large chunk of scalp as I pulled my fingers away (imagine a Barbie postage stamp). The small, wee square of skin was lined with ordered bumps (the holes from which my hairs grew out of) and looked vaguely like a circuit board. I remember the thrill of thinking this, of thinking that somehow my sophisticated machinery had failed in a very minuscule way, and had led to me unwittingly discovering my body’s own deceit. Perhaps I was a robot, an organic amalgam of biotechnology, of machine and flesh. I sat on this thought far longer than maybe I should have.

I mention this latest head bump because it popped up a little after another much smaller (though no less painful) one that has come up right between the bottom of my breasts and my stomach. Had the head bump’s twin travelled farther south than it had planned to? Again, it is slightly off centre. Again, I cannot quite pin what external force has conjured this thing into being. The underwire of my bras sit comfortably an inch or so above this pimple. I sit in bed and I feel the bump under my shirt, under the sleeveless nightdress I had recently bought to live in for the summer.

It is very early in the morning – the kind of early that is so indistinguishable from late – and the light from the edge of my curtains gently douse that of my desk lamp. The sheets feel smooth against my recently shaved legs, even as I feel the stubble emerging. My body is covered with a thin patina of sleep and the night. The bumps remain silent and stoic, and I rub them like worry beads, like crystal balls.

When will the next bit of shortcircuitry happen? When will another piece disintegrate and suffer some mechanical failure? I wait. There is nothing to do but ripen and wait.