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Every scar comes with a story — often a tale of deliverance, stupidity, serendipity, insanity, frustration, sickness or love. The luckiest storytellers and survivors, those within whom an enviable fearlessness abides no matter how painful the cause, can craft their experience into a fable.
Scars are best measured in laughter and vomit. There is that awesome ability, owned by a select few, to vividly depict, in words and undress, a forearm folded in half from a failed stunt or a nose ring ripped off by a blessed infant. Listeners heave and gag with delight, liked they’ve expressed a fetid cyst and smeared fists full of creamy goodness into their venial enemy’s hair. Whether a single stitch or a hardened gash that runs from boobs to jewels, every fable is intimate.
Every scar is cool.
Foreplay
The foreplay to foreplay, when you’ve entered a new relationship, is that discussion of deformities in preparation for the big reveal; that give and take of extra nipples, missing toes, half-finished tattoos and war wounds. The discourse that marks the first box on a flow chart that inexorably leads to orgasm or friendship is a tenuous virgin. American men inevitably have the most terrifying scar, from a common experience, with no attached memory, sliced within hours of landing on the planet.
Some scars are cooler than others.
Tumor
It’s an ugly, unfunny word. That said, excisions leave the coolest scars of all. They scream of a violent confrontation with a nasty, relentless bully who holds no compassion; a sociopath willing to rip off one’s wings and spit on one’s carcass. Tumor scars are remnants of a scrappy fight for life. Shards of glass jabbed mercilessly in the eyeballs of a monster.
Vicious, ugly, cool
My father died from melanoma. It took its pound of flesh. He fought nobly from the day he was born until the day he died. Cancer was the final foe. He punched it square in the face more than once and, as a struggling Buddhist, I’m chagrined to say that I welcomed the violence. Love transcends mindfulness in my case.
Over his last few weeks, a very close friend began fighting breast cancer. My father was older when he passed and had lived as full a life as the entirety of his circumstances would permit. My friend is young. A mother and wife and intelligent comrade-in-arms.
Her scar arrived yesterday.
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