“Skateboarding is a great way to get hurt without looking like you’re trying to get hurt,” she says, the laugh falling slightly from her eyes. She is acknowledging a truth I suspect too many of us at this table have felt.

I have been hurt skateboarding before. It was the last day of my sophomore year of high school and my friends and I had wandered to a skate park. One stupid decision led to another and the board went out from under me. I put my right hand back to break my fall, my arm locked tight against the impact. It stung a little, but I got up and brushed myself off and told my friends I would sit out for a little while.

After my wonderful, ounce-of-prevention mother took me to the doctor “just in case,” I learned I had broken my elbow and had to be in a cast for a month.

I wasn’t trying to get hurt. I knew a kid who was a professional, sponsored skateboarder and he had a gnarly scar from his cheek to his chin, the result of a bad fall. I was not looking for that kind of thrill. I was only fifteen and, much as I hated to admit it, there were some things that were still beyond me.

At this table, I recount this anecdote in brief. Someone else mentions a broken ankle, we laugh about the hazards of skateboards, we shift the topic to something else.

But I can see it in the eyes of several of us: that that particular fact about skateboarding was very possibly something we would have used at one point or another.

I find myself rubbing the scars on my arms. I was never one for neat razor-lines, I went in with my fingernails and came out bloody. I never needed skateboarding to hurt me without looking like I was trying to get hurt. I did that just fine on my own.

I was so out of it one day that I threw my body across the room at the bed. Innocuous enough, anyone else would have landed on the mattress and screamed for a while. But I’m a puncher. I planned, dimly, to hit the wall, bash up my shoulder a bit, earn some bruises to poke and press on for the next couple of weeks, eliciting a replication of the original trauma. But I hit wrong, landed oddly, and messed up my back for real. Bitter and angry at myself for not getting hurt the “right” way, I had to deal with bringing a rolling backpack to school for the rest of the year because my back would not support a backpack.

I see similar stories in the eyes of others. I only know three of the five people at this table; the girl who mentioned skateboarding is a stranger. There is an understanding, though. She knows.

In the last five years, I have (mostly) found other releases for my problems. But I no longer fear pain and do not say no to it. I run my hand across the baited edge of a knife, daring it to cut me. I step too close to a brick wall, scraping my bare shoulder on the bits of mortar sticking out. I jump from slightly too high, feeling my weight buckle in my ankles and travel up my calves.

I do not seek it out, but somehow it finds me.

It finds all of us, here at this table, reflecting upon this shared ordeal we each undertook in solitude.