September 7, 2008

• Really Long...and Introspective

  When I was young and my sister was younger she accidentally tipped a hot iron over onto my exposed right knee. It was an unpleasant experience, to say the least. Within a few hours I had the largest blister I had ever seen, and for the next few days I had to make every effort not to puncture it for fear of getting it infected. Inevitably, however, the blister broke open. The wound got infected, which left me with a fever for about a day, then it soon scabbed over and eventually healed. In its wake was a large, shiny new scar, and for a long time afterwards whenever my sister was near me and my knee I would point to my scar and blame her. She, of course, denied any culpability.

   

  But there are other scars, scars we don’t see but feel, scars we are sometimes unaware exist but experience the effects of regardless, much like the way a physical scar leaves its effect on the skin. Despite their relative invisibility, these scars are often prominent, manifesting themselves in manner, in words, in demeanor. And they too are memorable. 

   

  Some considerable time has passed since that physical scar, and I have since garnered some other scars. For a while I felt like the most memorable ones were the ones I got as a child, the physical, visible scars. There is, for instance, the slightly raised scar in the middle of my forehead from when I, dizzy from spinning in circles, stumbled and hit my head on my great-aunt’s unusually spiky flowerpot.  Or the little indented scar perilously close to my left eye, probably caused by a loose stone from some dirt road I was running down as a child.

   

  Before long I realized that life has a way of hurting, of scalding and biting and pulling at us so hard that soon enough, and often before we realize it, we are scarred, marked in ways we didn’t expect, and often cannot or do not acknowledge. I sat looking at my legs one evening, rubbed the marked places and remembered the circumstances surrounding them, sometimes even smiling at them. The experience, the pain, as unpleasant as it was at the time, is now a memory, a part of my life.

   

  I cannot yet say the same for my invisible scars which, I will admit, took me some time to identify and admit to. I cannot yet smile at those circumstances that left me feeling inferior; I cannot look and smile sincerely at the faces, either in person or in my memory, which are still able to cause that unmistakable painful, pounding, heavy feeling at my very center. I cannot help the sometimes empty feeling of missing someone from a different time, a different experience. I cannot help feeling that my scars are still pink and raw, still sensitive to the touch, still unhealed.

   

  This is, of course, because the healing process varies. Small wounds heal quickly and without much care. Larger wounds need cleaning, protection, time. And time really makes all the difference. We often don’t clean our larger wounds properly, once identified, and we don’t leave them alone long enough, give them enough time to heal. Instead, we tease the memories of lost friendships, of failed relationships, of ruined opportunities, of the wounds, the circumstances that can create scars. We do not give them time; leave them alone to heal. And sometimes even after the scar has healed we point to it, place blame because of it, are immobilized because of it, fearing that somehow down the line we’ll get another one just like it.

   

  But scars are meant to be badges of honor. They are meant to be flaunted, talked about, even bragged about. They are meant to represent an experience, a situation, a circumstance which, inevitably, we survived and, though it may have caused some pain, healed. Scars are proof of mending, of the healthy process by which a wound rights itself with time.

   

  My knee healed eventually, and soon so did my impression of the experience. My scar now represents something else, and I don’t mind exposing my knees. Soon, once they heal completely, I’m certain I’ll feel the same way about the scars I can’t see. And soon I’ll flaunt those too.

  • 1:27 pm
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