Scars
Last night I was stressed. Or excited, never can really tell sometimes. Most of the time. It’s the same bubbling, churning of the stomach. The same uneasy, hyper-real feeling. Everything feels hyper-real. So above real that you forget that the pot that you’ve just used to cook your eggs with is still scolding hot. The cold water is now the same temperature as my skin. Why did I try to hold the pot still? After a while my finger is still tender. It aches harshly. And there’s a line. A smooth line where there should be fingerprint. This fascinates me. I feel like a criminal who has to sand their prints off. At least my tear drop scar on the other hand makes more sense now. Although that one took a little while longer to become ‘fascinating’.
Its smoothness is so surreal and yet deliberate. It’s striking. It makes me think of my other visible scars. The aforementioned tear drop, and its ugly cousin in the center of the same hand. While now I joke about how they make me remember which hand is my right and which is my left, the memory of what caused the scar, over shadows this just slightly. They are not smooth like my new scar, they are pink, craggy and malformed. They are war wounds. As are all scars. Like a bad tattoo that you come to love with a very strange kind of nostalgia, a nostalgia of a more idiotic, naive, childlike version of yourself. Scars remind us of who we used to be. That can be a fond memory, or it can be a painful one. It all depends on how deep the wound still is.