Battle Scars, or Tales from Other Times

The roar of the shower coming from the room next to me kept me company as I chopped the vegetables. This had become somewhat of a routine. Josh and I would get off work at 6 AM, go to the grocery store for fresh vegetables, and return home to clean up and enjoy a massive salad with homemade cashew dressing. We were experimenting with veganism, and we looked forwards to those salads. We’d take turns doing the chopping as the other of us showered the day’s work off of our tired bodies. As I began in on the head of lettuce, I was lost in thought. I saw the red splatter before I felt the pain. My breath caught in my throat, and I had to sit down out of fear that I was going to faint. It was almost certainly not as bad as I thought. I tried to steady my breath and calm myself. It was no use. I wrapped a paper towel around my finger and walked to the bathroom door.

“Josh,” I said, uncertainly. The shower had been turned off but he was still closed up in the warm steam.

“What’s up, dear?”

“I need your help.”

Without a second’s hesitation, the door was open and there was a curious look on his face. It was not typical of me to say such a thing. I can be desperately stubborn when it comes to asking for help. I gestured towards my finger, finding it surprisingly difficult to speak.

“What happened?”

I told him that it must be the new ceramic knives. I’d underestimated how sharp they were. My finger got in the way. Did he think it needed stitches? Just earlier that week, I’d fallen and twisted my knee. It was bruised all to hell, and I avoided a trip to the E.R. because of my status as uninsured. Josh remarked that it seemed I was destined to end up there. He led me to the couch and gathered the needed supplies to doctor me up. He assured me it wasn’t indeed as bad as I’d suspected. A good old fashioned band-aid ought to do the trick. I reveled in his kindness and care. It is not often I allow myself the simple pleasure of being taken care of. I fight against it more often than not, the vulnerability. Fiercely independent. Guiltily dependent. Still, I appreciated it. I was never one to be made queasy by blood, but I couldn’t stand the sight  of the flap of skin just hanging from my finger, totally displaced. I knew from past experience that it would eventually have to come all the way off. That would have to wait for another day, and it did. The wound healed itself eventually. All that’s left of that day is a crescent moon scar just beneath my index finger’s nail.

Where my forehead meets my hairline there is another scar with a story. I was probably 8 or 9 years old. I’d began going to the Boys and Girls Club after school. I enjoyed it there, as there were plenty of fun activities and other kids to play with. There was a snack bar, surrounded by a glass wall. I could never afford the snacks within, but I’d sit with my friends as they munched. There was a sign on the wall that declared: “NO CLIMBING ON WALL.” I personally would never had considered it if not for the sign. Wanting to reach my friends in record speed, I decided it would be too much effort to walk all the way around. I must’ve had something important to share. Instead, I climbed over the wall. It could’ve gone without incident, but instead, I felt my head SMACK against the linoleum floor. This was not my first time busting my head open, nor would it be my last. My first reaction was to approach my friends who were lost in conversation.

“Is my head bleeding?” I asked the girls.

Faith looked up briefly, saying, “No, it’s not,” before immediately returning to her conversation. Less than a second went by while her brain managed to process the scene. “Wait, yes it is!” She went into hyperdrive, making me sit down. She ran and got one of the adults to help me. In the meantime, I was concerned that I would get in trouble for deliberately ignoring the sign and breaking the rules. I quickly concocted my story. The director of the club led me into her office so I could sit privately without the other kids gawking at my bleeding wound.

“I was running in the gymnasium and my shoe must’ve come untied, because I tripped and fell and hit my head on the floor.” It was partially true, a little skill I’d picked up from my dad, who liked to embellish the truth.

“It’s just a white lie,” he’d tell me. “It doesn’t hurt anybody.”

They believed my story and called my dad to see what we should do. He didn’t answer the home phone, so I gave the director the number to any of the three bars he could’ve been at. They reached him at the third one and explained the situation. My dad, apparently not thinking it was an emergency, said he’d finish his Euchre game and then come and fetch me. An hour or so later, he did pick me up. He took me to his home where we waited for my mom to take me to her home. When my mom picked me up and found out what happened, she was livid that my dad didn’t even consider taking me to the hospital. She immediately drove me to the emergency room.

By sheer coincidence, when we arrived, the nurse assigned to take care of my wound was Faith’s mom.

“Faith told me you climbed over the snack bar wall and smacked your head,” she told my mother and I.

My blood ran cold as my mother eyed me quizzically.

“She must be confused,” I returned. “I fell in the gym after tripping on my shoe lace.”

That was the end of the conversation, thankfully. I sighed with relief. My wound had closed up enough that it didn’t require stitches. I was sent home with a butterfly bandage and an order for my mother to wake me every few hours through the night to check for signs of a serious brain injury. She did, and while I contemplated channeling my best impression of Mary Kate and Ashley’s performance in the episode of “Full House” where Michelle gets amnesia, I decided against it. I answered my mom’s questions diligently and she let me go back to sleep each time.

A week or so ago at work, I was caring for a lady who is mostly detached from reality. She remembers her life as an elementary school teacher, but if you ask her if she needs to use the toilet, she will not have a viable answer. She’ll try to talk to anyone who can hear her, but her stories, as good intentioned as they may be, rapidly deteriorate into word salad.

“I saw a car overturned, there were two people,” she began eagerly. “They were playing bingo. I tried to stop it, but in the meantime, I peed my pants.”

The truth in that sentence was that she’d just been brought back to us from the bingo hall because the activities department suspected she needed to use the bathroom. She wove in and out of reality, and her stories did too.

It genuinely shocked me on the day I was helping her to the toilet when she grabbed my arm, pointed to a scratch that was there and demanded to know what had happened to me. I told her that my cat, Stella had scratched me when I was moving her off the kitchen counter.

“Oh, that makes sense.”

My knees show the evidence of my rough and tumble childhood. I was fortunate enough to have grown up on a dead end street just in front of some train tracks. From when I was 3 until I was 11 or so, my mom was married to an outdoorsy type man. This led to my childhood being filled with things like ATVs, dirt bikes, tree houses, trips to the creek, and more. I spent most of my early childhood out in my backyard, that at the time felt like the whole world, playing make believe with my little brother and the girl who lived two doors down. We’d pretend to make potions, mixing together ingredients we could find between our yards. Dirty diapers, dandelions, grass, and mud. That’s all it took to keep us occupied.

I was a clumsy kid, constantly tripping and falling. It only took a few wrecks on the go-cart for me to learn the valuable lesson that was wearing pants instead of shorts. But it only took one near-miss with my brother’s cape getting caught in the motor of the go-cart to learn the ever more valuable lesson of NEVER wearing capes. The go-cart wasn’t even running, we were just pushing it around manually. The chain caught the cape, and my brother’s face turned blue before I even had time to react. He desperately tried to push him self backwards to no avail. I managed to rip the cape from the chain, freeing him. The color rushed back, but we were both shaken. We ran inside to be consoled by our mother.

One night, I gathered our table scraps to take out to our dogs. My knee was freshly scraped that day, and I still felt it throbbing as I walked down the steps from the kitchen to the living room. I was holding a pan of leftover green beans, liquid from the can included, when I tumbled down the steps. I reopened my knee wound, but somehow managed to not spill a single drop of food nor liquid on our carpet. Resilient in only the way children can be, I hopped back up, eager to feed our pets.

Darker scars exist, too. Scars placed purposefully, or in a desperate attempt to relieve a different type of pain. I didn’t enjoy cutting myself. It scared me. I was always paranoid that I’d go too deep. The goal wasn’t to end my life, only to end the pain. When I did a stent in a long term residential mental health facility, I met a girl who’s arms were covered in what appeared to be burns. It was then I realized the only tool I needed was literally right at my fingertips. I was able to use my fingernails to inflict friction burns. In this facility, it was the only way I knew how to get attention. It was the only way I knew to get away from the chaos. When I would scratch myself, it would always result in getting a shot of some sort of anti-anxiety medication in my butt. That shot would lead to me being allowed to go sleep in my bedroom for hours. It was peaceful when I slept. There was nothing to worry about. Thankfully those scars are mostly faded. Some still remain, but it isn’t obvious what they are. In the summer time, when my skin is tanned, they disappear almost entirely. Allowing me to forget that the girl who put them there was really me.

Each scar on my body is a story. Some have been long forgotten, and others are headed towards the same destiny. Still others I will hold on to forever. Scars, a patchwork quilt of a different kind.