A brand and A Mark

The first scar I can remember having, although I am sure it was not the first, is a small mark on my forehead, all but absent and faded. At the time, I remember thinking it was a good idea to try and eat with my dog from his food dish. Joey, a normally temperate and dopey dog, lashed out at my intrusion on one of his livelihoods. He bit me right at the space in between where most people’s eyebrows stop. There was a cut and plenty of blood. As it was healing I found myself constantly picking at it. People warned me it would scar but that didn’t stop me. I felt, in a self-deprecating adolescent way, that I deserved the scar for scaring my canine.

We learn most by putting ourselves in danger, whatever that may constitute.

I suppose the next scars came from the various pock marks and divets along my calves and shins from mosquitoes. When people heard I was allergic, most scoffed. When I showed them the scars, they apologized. I’ve grown since then and they’ve faded and stretched and disappeared. But in the summer, when the mosquitoes are breeding, stewing and conquering, I stay in, stay pale, or hide behind a mist of repellant. Vanity still rules the bulk of my actions.

We are our bodies.

The third. In high school an intense friend of mine had a problem with cutting. Long sleeves in the summer. Dark clothes to hide his blood stains. I remember thinking, at the time, that he had to be incredibly, inanely stupid. During a confrontation he asked me if I had ever deliberately cut myself. I could only respond with my usual state of nonplus.

“There is a control there. That you don’t understand. My bullshit, my life, isn’t as painful as what I can inflict on myself. And if it kills on the inside I can at least make my outside match. And then a release. And then a healing.”

He had a father who was willing to pay for college if he would just go, an ex-girlfriend, my best friend, who had decided to make it look like she had moved on. He had money and an ever-present family who, while they pressured him, gave him what he needed. I didn’t see these things as problems worth a scar.

Still, I went home and opened my brother’s old straight razor. He had bought it as part of his need to return to “the old.” Long abandoned. I pressed the blade to my upper left forearm and pressed gently. Nothing, but a slight sting. I inhaled and drew it quickly with pressure. A small cut appeared and a few drops of blood. Not nearly as painful as I imagined. There was a burning and then a relief and then a reminder. A reminder that I was still standing there. I rolled up my pant leg and drew the blade across my shin. The pain was immense and it bled immediately. The cut was superficial and I doctored it immediately; water, soap, a bandage, and Neosporin (which kept it from scarring). I began to clean the blood from the bathroom tile when I noticed more crimson falling to the floor. My arm, being fleshier than my shin, felt less pain but had been cut deeper. Looking at it today, the scar is faint, but also a reminder.

We are not nearly in control of our bodies as we would like to think we are.

At school, the next day, I found him, grabbed him in front of everyone and said, “I understand. I don’t agree, but I understand. We all have our ways of running away.”

In college, while trying to make a hamburger, a searing blob of fat and grease splattered and splayed across my right wrist and my left knuckle. The skin on my knuckle slid off and I was no longer hungry. Days later my wrist bubbled large and burst, healing itself into disappearance. But my knuckle remains raised and red.

A lesson, that we are not always as grown up or capable as we think we are.

Here, in Chicago, after a particularly momentous and unrelenting two years, my roommate and I decided to take charge of our own bodies. We bit our lips and prepared for the burn, the tear, the renting and watched as we made our own pain. We designed our scar and it will be with us forever. Each is significant to only us and I suppose we will tire of explaining. But it was important. And after the tattooing, amidst the blood and skin and throb, I couldn’t help but feel a release and tingle in my body.

We grab onto wounds and scars, to slow things down, to prove our standing and, for a moment, to breathe before flinging ourselves back into danger.

We are and we are not our bodies. Scars and flaws, defects and pimples. This is what we are made up of.
Tree rings on a human map. And these scars can be found inside as well. Cut as in half and you could read us, I think.

A cut for the loss of my lady.
A bruise from a friend’s relocation.
A hole from the recent death of him who left long ago.
A crooked bone from your mother really going crazy.
A self-inflicted tear from the stupidest night of my life.

But, I feel, we must look at what is whole, at the rest. What surrounds these craters and crevices. At the tissue that is forming, hardening and piling around them. The rest is experience. The rest is growth. Those scars are life. And they are beautiful.