When a Scar Is a Choice
Photo by Berkshire Community College via Flickr. A scar is an honorable notion. The skin rebuilds with quiet determination, slowly weaving itself back together, willing itself to grow, forcing itself to fill a gap that was left there. The body doesn’t give up on itself.
Six minuscule scars dot my body, each a result of large procedures with microscopic incisions. Four are from surgery after I dislocated my shoulder when I was seventeen, the two on my hip from after I tore a labrum and chipped a bone when I was twenty-two. They’re almost invisible, specks of permanent whiteness in a pale sea. They could be considered my body’s art, or artifacts, or graffiti, or tattoos. They are distant memories of another life, my body’s way of cataloguing the trials of an amateur athlete.
Look closely and there’s a small crescent on the front of my right shoulder, a fingernail clipping engraved in the skin. Above it is another mark, a slice like a permanent paper cut. They dance parallel to
