I'll show mine, if you show me yours

Thin as fishing line. White as bone. Hidden where no one can see.

I've got this scar.

It hides below my collar, a pale moon crescent the doctor called "superficial." As if depth was all that mattered.

I was at this dive bar once when a man with prison-yard biceps showed me his scar, a razor line that ran from behind his left ear across his throat, ending at his right collarbone. "Got this from a bitch who loved me," he said, tracing it with his nicotine-stained thumbnail. I nodded like I understood.

My scar appeared on a Tuesday in March.

Outside, winter was giving up; salt-crusted streets and ice turning to slush in the gutter. Inside, my kitchen smelled of garlic and rosemary. We were fighting about something small. My drinking, maybe, or whose turn it was to call the landlord about the rent, and me not having it.

Her hands trembled as she pressed a kitchen towel to my neck, whispering apologies while the pot boiled over on the stove.

In the emergency room, a nurse with tired eyes asked if I felt safe at home. I laughed. She didn't.

The stitches came out two weeks later. The relationship lasted another 16 years.

What’s a scar but evidence of survival? The body's way of saying: here is where something tried to break me, and here is where I refused.

Still, I’m not proud of it. I don't show it to anyone.

It's mine, though, this map, this border between then and now.

The Mathematics of Healing

I've got this scar.

Seven inches long. Forty-six stitches in total, but that’s not all. One night in the emergency room. Two police officers asking questions I wouldn't answer. Six weeks of relative peace between us.

The numbers don't add up to much.

You need more numbers:

Twenty-seven, my age when it happened. Four, the years we stayed together without any children. Two, the number of children we had. Eight, the number of times she'd lost control before this. Zero, the number of times I'd mentioned it to anyone.

Why? Pretty simple equation, really: violence plus silence equals shame.

But the mathematics of healing is more complex. There's no formula for how to carry your wounds, no algorithm for how a body opens, closes, forgets, then remembers.

My father was a quiet man who never raised his voice, let alone his hand. Probably because he grew up in violence, then volunteered to fight in a war that wasn’t his. A war he couldn’t win.

That changed him.

He taught me to be kind and to walk away from fights. But that didn’t prepare me for battle, the war of loving someone whose emotions ran like live wires through a flooded basement.

After it happened, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, counting the black threads that held me together.

It faded over time, like scars do. A thin white line now, barely visible unless you know where to look. But I never look. Don’t talk about it. Don't show it off.

But I still touch it sometimes.

What Remains

I've got this scar.

Thin as fishing line. White as bone. Hidden where no one can see.

Last month in the pool, my grandson pointed to it. "What's that?" he asked, his tiny fingers tapping my bubbled skin.

"It's a reminder," I said.

"Of what?"

What could I tell him? That accidents happen? That even good people do horrible things? That sometimes love comes with teeth?

"That I got better," I finally said.

He seemed satisfied with that answer.

I’ve got this scar.

No one can see it unless I choose to show it, but I never do.

Even if I showed you, it wouldn't mean much. I mean, it looks nothing like it used to when it first happened.

And if I could take you back, show you the wound, wide open and weeping, my life oozing out before your eyes, you still wouldn’t feel what I feel, or know what I know about how it got there in the first place.

That scar represents a part of me that’s no longer there. I lost that part of me when the scar appeared. Now the scar is all I have left to remind me of what I lost that day.

That scar doesn’t define me. That scar is not me. But some think it tells a story about me.

I am not my wounds. I am not my scars.

Neither are you.

And if you wound another, does that make you a monster?

I don’t think so.

It can’t. Otherwise, we’d all be monsters. We’d all be monsters because we wound each other all the time, even when we’re being our most careful, our most loving, and our most kind.

Scars are the way our bodies keep our Self inside and the world outside.

Our scars protect us, but they are not us. And we are not wounded. Not really.

We are healed.

We have proof.

---

I love you guys. ♥️

Thank you for being here. 🙏

—Paul

---

Special thanks to Alberto Arroyo on Unsplash for the wonderful photo that accompanies this essay. Thank you, Alberto.