scar /skär/
noun
noun: scar; plural noun: scars
“a lasting effect of grief, fear, or other emotion left on a person's character by a traumatic experience.”
Oxford Languages
Him
My dad collects stitches like they’re stamps.
He picked fights with a lot of strong guys; he needed stitches. He played football, mediocrely; he needed stitches. He snitched, and, guess what? He got stitches. I wouldn’t describe my dad as unlucky, though. He had a knack for barely escaping fatal injuries. Attempting to sneak over a chain-linked fence as a teen, his left leg got torn up in the process. Regular stitches couldn’t prevent the inevitable, though: scarring. It’s still there, and it’s still just as unflattering. Another instance, a solid contender for one of the most jarring experiences in this man’s life, was a car accident involving him and his sister. Luckily, he left only with a great gash on his leg. Unluckily, a contrast to my earlier statement, it’s on his left leg again. Unluckily times two, it is one of the biggest, nastiest scars I’ve ever seen. I’ll admit that as a kid, it was scary-looking. I didn’t understand why his skin had been mutilated and why it looked different from the rest of his caramel legs. He urged me to touch it, assuring me that wounds don’t bite, but I would always refuse, afraid that I would contract scar cooties. This was until the
day in every adolescent’s life where that spur-of-the-moment bravery spawns from thin air, when you suddenly learn to appreciate the bitterness of dark chocolate, when naps are no longer a death sentence, and when touching your dad’s scar will make you cooler. I felt so oh-so inclined to take him up on his offer, and I’m glad I did. When I touched the skin, I was surprised by the texture: it was smooth. Smoother than most things I had felt in my lifetime. In my head, I guess I assumed it would be as rough and rugged as it looked. I marveled at his battle scar, and he smiled. “See, I told you!” he said. When I really stop to think about it, it truly was just a random day, but it’s something that changed my mind. He smiled and then I thought the scar was beautiful.
...
Believe it or not, the car accident did not result in his most life-threatening scar. In 2013, my school hosted its annual 5k run, an event my family would participate in more often than not. My mom and I jogged, walked, and stopped; we paced ourselves, but had lost my dad in the crowd after some time. When we had all gathered together after crossing the finish line, I guess I was too young to notice the extra beads of sweat dripping down my dad’s forehead. We already didn’t eat at Cracker Barrel often, but after an early morning of socializing and peak physical exertion, its southern charm seemed appetizing. We never got seated, though. I watched from the backseat as my dad held his chest. The AC was on and it had to have been at least an hour after the race had ended, but he was still sweating. My mother was frantic. She always got jumpy whenever one of us was in pain. She was always the one to urge going to the ER and my dad was always the one who refused. That day, he didn’t. Memorial Hermann took him away in a helicopter, and I watched it fly. Later that week, it would be my first time spending the night in a hospital. I’m unsure if it was my mom’s, as she was sufficiently prepared as always. Thankfully, he had a speedy recovery and would only need to stay in the white cloak and tiny bed for a few extra days. We wiped the sweat from our foreheads.
Immediately upon returning to school, a private, Christian academy, I remember all of us being tasked with writing down a time when we felt angry with God. I was a grade schooler and I didn’t have to think very hard; I just wrote down what frustrated me. I didn’t know we’d have to read it to the entire chapel. I got up on stage and explained why I was angry at God and the world for giving my dad a heart attack, an attempt on his life, an irreversible scar. I closed with a thanks to Him for ultimately saving my dad’s life. I remember the chapel falling silent for a moment. Later, I was followed up with hesitant applause. It is difficult for people to understand and empathize with things they have not experienced, to accept feelings of complex anger in a tiny body, to address the occasional qualm with God, to feel scars they cannot see. I think about all of his scars. I think about the knicks on his body. I think about his big, durable heart. I think about him smiling and saying it doesn’t hurt. I think about how it never hurts. I think about how the scars made him that much cooler; so much swagger for a some-age-over-40-year-old man at the time. I think of how he defies every definition of what a scar is supposed to embody or be, how the synonyms and suffering do not apply to him, how what I viewed as ugly and scary held nothing to his grit.
Frankly, I could not understand him.
Me
In 8th grade, I thought I was the shit.
I had been on the track team for a year, a triple jumper with no prior experience in many other events, and, to everyone’s surprise (including my own), I decided to try my legs at hurdles. I worked with our hurdling coach and built up enough confidence to commit to a try-out run. Let’s just say: I didn’t
make the team. I toppled over more than one hurdle in the span of a measly 300 meters; I fell, hard. Nonetheless, I crossed the finished line... with a river of blood racing down my leg. I had gravity to thank for the gushing wound right below my scraped knee. I didn’t know it then, but that memory would leave a firm imprint on both my mind and body. A scar. At this point in my career. The ugliest one I had seen after my dad’s. I still have that scar. It’s shrunken a bit and I don’t pay as much mind to it now as I may have in the past, but I know it’s there. Every time I wear a bathing suit. Every time I wear shorts (rare). Every bath. Every shower. She’s there, slyly making her presence known to every eye she graces.
...
I always thought that when someone said the word “scar” out loud, it sounded kind of derogatory. If someone were to say it with enough oomph to, say, a foreigner who didn’t speak any English, I’m sure their reaction would equate to fear or worry. The hard cuh sound the c makes is pretty aggressive. The harshness of the ar sounds like the Argh of an angry pirate. The err noise you make by the end is just as offensive, sounding similar to the ur in cur. You see, it’s only a four-letter word, and yet it produces so much sound; it makes itself known. It’s only a four-letter word, but if you add an e or y at the end, you can begin why, at first, I cowered at the sight of my dad’s freakishly beautiful scar. When I got my first scar, I felt insecure and wanted to see how my hurdle-induced injury compared to others’. I went to Google images, a very deep dive, I know, and simply searched the word "scar". I found many shots of cuts and discolored limbs. Clicking on a couple of these pictures, I was directed to sites offering different treatments and therapies and lasers to break up the tissue or make it look better, but this ultimately made me feel worse. The little captions under the pictures pressured me even more: “Erase the Past: Advanced Scar Removal” and “Hypertrophic Scars Can be Eliminated with a Specialist” were the headlines that succeeded in hitting me like a truck.
The more I scrolled, the worse I saw, and I quickly came to terms with the fact that my scar was virtually invisible. The more I thought about all the information I was absorbing and the more I realized how much money a removal would cost, the more I considered the lack of necessity in hiding what I had. A subtle fondness for my deformed knee had begun to grow from my Google foraging.
...
Fast forward to the relative present and you have me in a rush to straighten out my clothes (everyone knows that wrinkles are a bad look). I pour a bottle of water into a thrifted iron and let the steam hit my face; I feel my pores open involuntarily and close my eyes. As the description suggests, I got a little carried away in the moment, carelessly ironing with my head elsewhere, in clouds of thrifted steam. Not in my rightest mind, I ended up brushing my arm against the metal rim. I felt it, sure, but I didn’t care enough to do anything about it at the time because, as stated above, I was in a rush. It was only after I finished ironing my skirt that I went to check it out in the mirror. It was fresh, but not painful. I knew I should’ve probably sought out some medical aid, that Dora band-aid, some cocoa butter, but the fumes from my burned flesh had already made their way to my brain; I just wanted to look at it. I was weirdly excited. I was eager to joke and tell my friends that I’d been bitten by a shark or maybe mauled by a bear, or more realistically, attacked by some giant, killer mosquito (as I live in Texas). But when I did tell my friends, when I showed them, their faces contorted. I was repeatedly asked if I was okay and received the occasional apology for my scar’s inconvenience. Gee thanks; I didn’t understand the issue. I didn’t get why my scar had to be a bad thing when my initial thought was the opposite. I couldn’t understand what made it so ugly, so I smiled. The burn was clean. It wasn’t smooth, but I was proud.
My dad survived what looked like World War 3, and I had survived the iron.
Her
I’m no sadist.
That said, I’ve inflicted my fair share of scars onto the people I care about. Victim One: my mother. Blessed with a healthy little parasite (me), her belly grew to hold the 9-lb newborn that would change her life, and body, completely. I emphasize the growing of her belly not only because that is the fate of all pregnant women, but because I left her with a bunch of stretch marks. Light, jagged streams that I etched into her mocha skin, streams she doesn’t dare to show the world. One day, I dialed her to ask about how she would feel if someone caught a glimpse of her marked body. She asked me something in return: So what? This answer caught me off guard. She explained to me that she takes pride in the marks, the scars, because she takes pride in being my mother; I was dumbfounded. I could only stutter into the mic. She said her stretch marks remind her of the day I was brought into this world, and I heard a sort-of resolution in her tone. I think about the stretch marks on my body despite not having any parasites of my own. I see them peeking around my knees and lining my hips, light just like hers. Half of the time, I don’t realize they’re there, but she sees me in her own every day. She has scars on each of her forearms, almost identical to one another, and I am, again, the indirect cause of her suffering. Volunteering at one of my school events, my mother was a part of a sort-of impromptu-kitchen-staff frenzy. In her valiant attempt to take out a cookie sheet from my school’s oven, her arms got caught in the crossfire; the oven won. She never fails to remind me of this catalytic event and we never fail to giggle at its stupidity. Those scars, though, show up dark on her milk chocolatey skin. When I asked her how she felt about these, she said:
I have twins! They match! It’s rare you see scars identical like these. In that moment, I realized that the scars would never win against her. They couldn’t taint her; they couldn’t touch her self-esteem. She tells me that when she got the burns on her arms, she didn’t care enough to put cocoa butter on them (to make the color less apparent), and I am immediately transported back to the iron I grazed not-so long ago. I understand her better now, her scars of motherhood, PTA, and loving too much. I am unsure if I can still refer to her as my victim. The last question I asked her on that phone call was why her scars were still so visible. She replied: I’m older, so it doesn’t heal the same.
Us
Oxford Languages tells me that there are scars I can’t see.
People modify their bodies all the time. From inks to piercings to brandings, there are those who mark themselves in creative ways, those who take a lot of pride in their scars. A modifier named Andrew once said that “In body modification, you can take control of what you otherwise could not,” a quote I find intriguing to this day (Pitts 1). Given the agency, people may take the initiative to scar themselves before Life can, but I think there’s a spontaneity in getting scarred; an element of surprise. For instance, I didn’t know that my dad would have another heart attack. It’s the very nature of the heart attack to not warn you when it’s coming. I had no idea that the scars from his first one would seep so deeply into the iron body he had curated a decade later. After that day in 2013, my dad devoted himself to leading a healthier lifestyle. He would always say: “Can’t have your dad looking like a big ol’ chubs at graduation,” followed with a light chuckle. Over the years, I noticed more how his self-image deeply affected him. Cabinets would overflow with fish oil pills, green vitamins, and bottles with names I couldn’t pronounce. When he said he needed to switch to a vegan diet, we followed him. My tongue
would be stained with the tastes of black bean patties and meatless meatballs. There were salt stains on his uniform both in the summer and when the weather had cooled. He would leave at 4 a.m. to run, to go to the gym, to exert himself on that UPS truck, to burn away at his genetics. I found books in his old room about how to prevent, how to beat, one’s damaged heart. I can only assume that he wanted to strip Life of its power before it could exercise its heavy hand. I suppose he is a body modifier himself, taking initiative, but he was older and he did not heal the same. I can only assume that he feared death a little, despite his claims that he feared no thing and no one. On April 3, 2023, he died on his birthday. His candle was blown out by the will of swollen limbs, a tired, iron body, and God. On April 3, 2023, I was scarred for life, and this was not one I could ignore. I couldn’t touch this scar and see it in a new light. I had the urge to grab the cocoa butter. No Google image could compare. My mother’s words could not console me; yes, I am still young, but I cannot heal from this the same. I found it hard to smile like he did, to smile when the scar was ugly. I know because I tried.
...
My mom and I still make spaghetti with meatless meatballs from time to time; we will taste them for dinner, for forever.
...
His pills and vitamins have disappeared. There is dust in his room. His car is falling apart. His urn sits above our fireplace. UPS trucks are filled with packages he will never deliver. His clothes are unworn. His ashes are in my necklace, and he has transferred the scars on his heart to my mother, to me. We are stuck with this scar for eternity, for forever. It is a year and a half old, but it cannot heal the same.
...
A scar isn’t just a noun. It’s a memory, a regret, a funny story, a hurdle injury, a killer mosquito bite, a death. A scar is tears. Scars are nasty, marvelous, freakishly beautiful knicks on my dad’s legs. They are the strength of his character and the vulnerability of the human body. They prove that he, too, was human even though his smile was humanly impossible. Scars are the stretch marks that remind my mother that I am all she has left; scars remind my mother that she is alive. Scars are a paradox to me. They are things I love to hate, things I hate to love, and things I learn to plain hate all over again.
Works Cited: Pitts, Victoria. In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utxa/detail.action?docID=307886. "Oxford Languages." Oxford Languages and Google, languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/. Accessed 9 Dec. 2024.