Peace is Every Cold Sore

Unlikely teachings from an unwanted teacher

There was talk on dorm that she’d gotten it from one of the boys in the grade above us, a kid from New York. Dirty New York. Syringes in the streets New York. Sex parties in basements and rancid garbage on the curb and sad unhoused people who haven’t showered in months with gaping wounds on their faces New York. God only knows where he’d picked it up.

The two of them broke up eventually, but not before he could give her a little parting gift, that unmistakable red badge of shame on her upper lip. Nothing worse than a cold sore, am I right, crowing itself unstoppably into existence like the neighbors’ rooster. We boys talked about her with some combination of meanness and pity. For me, the meanness had to do with the fact that I thought she was cute and why hadn’t she wanted to date me instead of the cool New York City boy? The pity had to do with the fact that I thought I was better than her. I would never allow such an impurity to make contact with my holy diamond of a body.

But the next year, with just a month left before high school graduation, she was interested in me. We got together. Maybe it came from her, or maybe I got it from one of the bros with whom I shared solo cups over beer pong that first semester in college, but sure enough, it was during my freshman spring that my first cold sore began to sprout above my own upper lip, just beneath the right nostril. It didn’t bloom inside my nostril, unfortunately. Inside would have been no problem. No one would’ve known. I could’ve gone to parties and classes and done the whole thing without the dread certainty that whoever looked at me saw the truth of my hideousness. My self-consciousness was like a fire alarm that just didn’t stop. Eventually the sore scabbed over, but the scab would crack, then it would need to heal again and this went on for a solid month or so. Felt like a year.

I remember going to a women’s lacrosse Kentucky Derby party with some girls from my dorm and getting so drunk on mules that the fire alarm quieted a bit. I didn’t care anymore. I was free, for a night, from the loathsome herpetic harbinger of my humanity. A few days after the party, I remember looking at pictures of that night with my friend and seeing a close-up shot of me. Somehow in the picture I was pure, sore-less, the god I’d used to be. How could that be? Even now, sitting on the couch with my friend, the cracked scabby thing was still squatting right there below my nose. It was a miracle. Whoever had parted the sea for Moses and brought Christ back from the dead had done me a real solid. Eventually I realized my friend had probably just glossed me up on Photoshop, bless her.

The next week, one of the senior guys in my all-male a cappella group looked at me just as we were about to start singing on stage in the student union, and with a wicked grin, thumbed the spot just beneath his own right nostril and winked. I remember my psychological backbone buckling.

When the sore finally healed, I put it out of my mind, best I could. But a few years after graduating from college, I was at a potluck and got a text from a woman I’d recently kissed, asking me point-blank if I had oral herpes. She was feeling some tingling on her upper lip, she said. I said yes, and she said she wished I had told her, and I said I’m sorry and then proceeded to spin out in shame to the point that I couldn’t really hear what anyone was saying at the potluck, the fire alarm in my head was so loud. Test came back negative, she told me later. I remember the flood of relief, then, to know that I had not ruined this woman’s life after all. I was still disgusting, of course, still a faded, broken diamond riddled with impurities, but at least I hadn’t passed on my grossness to her.

What is the deal with shame, anyway? Why do we do it? How does it happen that shame dumps its viral load into us such that the compromised immune systems of our own self-love and self-respect and self-belonging are triggered into such monumental allergic reactions of self-loathing and self-diminishment and self-cruelty? Who’s to blame for the shame? Where did it come from? The Christians? The Republicans? Capitalism? White supremacy? Who was the first Homo sapiens who looked at another Homo sapiens and was like, “Oh, you? You’re not normal, not quite right. Me, I’m normal. But you, you’re . . . what should I call it? How about freak? Yeah, I like the sound of that. You’re a gross freak.” And the other Homo sapiens was like, “No I’m not,” and the founding father of shame goes, “Yeah you are,” and this keeps happening until finally the first gross freak was made when the accused finally believed the accusation.

That’s how it works, as far as I can tell. We make ourselves into what we believe ourselves to be. 

The sore came back (it always comes back) this time during a two-week silent meditation retreat, which was a relief because you’re not supposed to talk or make eye contact with anyone at a silent meditation retreat. No one would see my viral companion. I could hide away in my spiritual cocoon of would-be enlightenment. During the retreat, in my room each morning, in front of the mirror, I smeared ointment onto the wound and said aloud to the sore as if it could hear me, “I love you,” and, “You’re beautiful,” and, “Thank you for being here.” I didn’t mention to it that I would still very much prefer it to leave as soon as possible and never come back, but I’m sure the sore knew the truth beneath my overtures of kindness. It lingered, as if giving me a chance to really believe my own words.

The conditions of reality are neutral, the dharma teachers at the retreat informed me during their evening lectures. Suffering is not in the cold rain outside, or in that mean name someone just called you, or even in the physical pain of the body. Suffering is something we do to ourselves, they said, in the way that we choose to relate to the ever-changing conditions of our lives.

In other words, it’s not the cold sore that’s causing your problems, bro. It’s the way you’re relating to the cold sore. You hate the condition of the cold sore: so you suffer from hate. You’re ashamed of this condition: so you suffer from shame. You think this condition means something bad, something bad about you: so you suffer from believing in “bad” and believing in “you.”

“Peace is every step.” Thich Nhat Hanh can have that one.

“Peace is every cold sore.” I don’t think anybody’s taken that one yet.

You never see any Buddha statues with cold sores, you know? Is a Buddha immune to the lowly cold sore? Or is it that enlightened beings are so free that they can rock a cold sore with impunity, untroubled by shame, untouched by the stories that would hook them into suffering?

I suspect freedom is much more uncomfortable than I’ve imagined it to be. I’ve imagined that it must be a pleasant state, to be free, but surely freedom involves the willingness to tell the truth, so what about speaking those uncomfortable truths we were taught to hide in shame? Surely freedom involves the ability to love what is, to accept what is, to resist the impulse to bind oneself into the Chinese fingertrap of resistance to what is…but what about all the cold sores of reality? All the ugly reasons to resist? There are so many. Without Photoshop, the face of reality looks pretty rough. Beautiful, but rough.

Little experiments in freedom are called for, maybe. Little risks. Little reveals. Anything more than that, for me, and freedom becomes too terrifying to consider.

On our first date, for example, I told Tana, my fiancée, that I really wanted to kiss her, but that I had to tell her something first. We’d gone for a hike deep into the summer woods. We were sitting by a little stream where I would ask her, one year later, to marry me. We could both feel the kiss coming, and in the movies, you just go for it, you just let it happen, you don’t pause the songbirds and silence the violins. You don’t face her in the shaft of sunlight that suddenly illuminates you both and say, “Hold on a sec. I, uh, I have oral herpes, and I just want you to know, so that if you do ever want to kiss me, you’re aware of what you’re getting into. It’s not a huge deal, like 50-80% of the population has it, but, you know, it’s a thing.”

Tana looked at me as if she were seeing a sun rise, indeed made me feel like a rising sun, and said, “I want whatever you have.” My benevolent lady. Just the other day I told her I feel like a failure, went on for a solid three or four minutes, and then after a pause she goes, “Whatever you are, you’re mine.”

That is literally all my cold sore has ever wanted to hear from me. It’s what all my failures are longing for, to know that I know that they belong to me.

I’ve got one now, a sore. I’ve been sick, and with my immune system down, the sore saw it’s chance. It now sits atop my upper lip, its favorite spot, defying my attempts to hurry it up to heal. If you’re hurrying something to heal, it’s probably not healing, you know? Whatever you are, you’re mine…that said, if you could just clear up and get the hell out of here ASAP that’d be great. Nah.

“Have you been saying I love you to it in the mirror?” Tana just asked me after reading this piece, about my sore. I haven’t been. And it knows. The sore always knows. It’ll stick around as long as it’s needed, as long as it takes for me to understand the teachings, to live them again, or for the first time, and then, like any master teacher, it’ll disappear.