now, when arrows don’t penetrate, see Cupid grabs the pistol
this one’s gonna be gross.
i’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “every scar is a story.” the problem is, sometimes that story is “i was three or four years old and taking a bath and stood up too fast and stabbed my butt cheek with the tub’s faucet.” i have a quarter-inch scar under my left eye that’s faded over the fifteen or so years since i got it. i didn’t get it off a fight or anything fancy like that. my baby cousin hadn’t had her finger nails and she caught me while i held her.
my friend drew, back in high school, used to joke that my forearms looked like i’d crawled through barbed wire and broken glass. he was exaggerating, of course, but looking at my left arm now, and ignoring scars that have completely faded… i’ve got ten scars immediately visible.
the two most visible ones are also the most recent. a late night pancake accident ended up flipping some grease my way. one of the drops grazed my arm, leaving a streak, while the other hit me dead-on, leaving a hole slightly smaller than a dime. those are already fading pretty quickly, though. that was maybe three weeks ago.
i’ve got a long and thin one about the length of my thumb. we were clearing out some bushes at my grandparents house and knocking down the wall around the pool. i had on gloves, but pulling and yanking on a thorn bush backfired when one of the thorns caught me. i don’t remember if i felt this one— i do remember looking down and seeing the cut, and i might have rinsed it off with the hose, but i know i didn’t quit working.
that’s a running theme for me, too. i used to play basketball in high school, and we’d sometimes do pickup games, too. the deepest scar on my left arm, the one least likely to go away, is on the back of my hand, near the thumb. amir, a kid i used to play with, was wearing a nice watch while we were shooting around. we collided somehow, maybe off a block or a pick, and his watch dug out a pretty good chunk of the back of my hand. i remember that one being pretty bad. like, bad enough that i looked down and noticed white meat before it started bleeding. i’m pretty sure i wrapped it up and kept playing, though. that one stung.
there’s two parallel horizontal lines on the back of my hand and a small vertical line off to the side. the horizontal lines are from a hot lighter that a friend jabbed me with in high school. you know how those will make smiley faces if you burn yourself with them? this one just gave me two lines, no smile for me. the vertical one… i don’t even know. it’s a little under a quarter of an inch. a mystery scar.
there’s a kitchen knife accident on my middle finger, too, on the side. i actually haven’t thought about this one in years, which is funny, because this is the first one i remember freaking me out. i reached into a murky sink and felt a sharp pain. when i pulled my hand out of the sink, i found a paring knife stuck in the side of my finger.
and i mean, this wasn’t like a head-on stab, the cool kinda stab wound you see in movies where you can just yank it out and throw a bandage on it. this was at an angle, so when i yanked the knife out, i was left with three things: a flap, a hole, and a sink that was suddenly a lot redder than it was before. it wasn’t a big hole— paring knives are only so big, and this was mostly the tip of the knife. but, it was enough to make a high schooler temporarily freak out.
and the flap wasn’t going anywhere. this was pretty deep. and it stung when i touched it. so i’m trying to think this through, figure out how to stop the bleeding, when i have a brainstorm that was probably pretty stupid. i have a flap. there is a hole. flaps close holes… and this won’t bleed if it’s closed. so i grit my teeth, rinse all the filthy dishwater and blood out of the hole, push the flap into place, and throw a heavy-duty band-aid on it and wrap it up tight.
when it healed, it healed two-tone. the hole wasn’t quite covered all the way, so it healed kind of light. the flap varies from my normal skin tone to slightly darker. even to this day, it’s like that. that’s memory lane for you: blood and water. i don’t know if i finished the dishes.
my right arm is cleaner, but that’s only due to time. i can see a few faded ones, including a constellation of five or so that begins a few inches from my elbow. chicken pox? spider bites? i dunno. my hand is representing, though. my index finger has a scar i’ve had since i was prepubescent. i walked past one of those toy tables my cousin had and scored half an inch of a deep cut. the table was falling apart, you see, and the cheap lining was hanging off. somehow i walked past, swinging my hands i guess, and bam.
most of the other scars on my hand come from broken glass. in high school in madrid, the city buses had these awesome emergency glass breakers. there were two kinds— the little piddly hammer kind and the awesome future-tech looking pistol grip kind. i ended up with a pistol grip, which i kept in my bag. it came in handy when i’d stay over my friend juri’s house and we’d go out doing hoodlum crap at three in the morning. i hit a pane of bus station glass with it once, and that was the time i learned to wear gloves when doing stupid things. because broken glass is beautiful in that split second after you hit it, when it shatters and hangs in the air, and sharp and horrible when that split second passes and it rains razor blades down your hand and wrist. each knuckle has the now-faded effects of that night, excepting the fourth, which somehow managed to escape unscathed while the space between the third and fourth took one for the team.
my last significant scar is actually the only one with a reasonable origin. i had surgery on the side of my neck and they stitched it shut. it’s closed pretty well, and i was surprised when a girl i used to know noticed it and asked me about it. i never think about it. i think it was maybe ten years ago, now?
scar stories. i expect to earn a few more before i die.
