I did some dumb stuff as a kid. Now, looking back with the wisdom of a full-grown human, I’m sure that I was looking for attention of various kinds…
I was really young, perhaps six or seven, when I–in a fit of anger over being locked in my bedroom–decided to stick a metal hairpin into an electrical wall socket. Not only did this act blow the power of our single wide trailer home, but it melted my thumb and forefinger flesh to one another, the hairpin painfully sandwiched in the middle. The pin shaped scars lived to tell their story in my fingerprints for decades…
I’ve already shared my old, weather worn couch and rattlesnake story. No need to go back there here. *shudder*
Throughout late middle and early high school I did the worst of it. Like many girls my age, I was in pursuit of not only parental love and attention, but the attention of boys too. A boy’s attention warranted the sort of popularity that my naive self had determined was most validating.
I wanted to feel valid…
I also, having arrived at this point in my life from a foundational origin of childhood trauma, took my pursuits for love secret steps farther. Cutting, carving into, and burning my body primarily. Punishing this self for the ways in which I saw it had failed me. Fingers down throat, diarrhetics, deprivation of hydration or nutrition–of enjoyment… As bad as those choices were, they weren’t the sort of dumb teen stuff I am referring to.
I’m talking about vegetable oil and sunshine!
Together.
This body lathered in cooking oil while laying out with friends… peaceful afternoon naps in the cozy sunlight where I barbequed my flesh to the point of black, blistering char. The swimsuit criss-cross design became the ornament of my skin. Twenty years later my back still shown that X. Now, nearly three decades after that brilliant summer habit, while the difinitive lines have faded, the freckled clusters of scarred open spaces still tease that the kiss of a shape may live on forever…
There’s the scar on my nose from tumbling stubbornly down a hill…
The painful, cystic deformity I will live my entire life with because I insisted on wearing size 5 1/2 shoes, while my feet naturally filled a 10.
The scars from childhood– both living on the surface of this shell but also veining deep into the inside, have shaped me. They’ve taught me to walk with caution, to show myself grace, to actively love this body… to try and send love out into the world.
Some of the scarring stems from the consequences of my stupidity, but also from the recklessness of others. They stay with me, altering my person in seen and unseen ways. I am neither the melted flesh of my careless choices, nor the result of cruelty rained upon me.
I house the remnants of what was– I am the relic…
Rainy Day in May... 