Written on the Body

I like scars. They’re sexy. They’re interesting.

Every scar has its story to tell: a drama; an adventure; an accident; an illness; a confrontation with Voldemort. Someone wholly unmarked cannot tell of their sledging accidents, sword-fights, smallpox, surgery, snake-bites or sky-diving.

Exploring a new skin, there’s a thrill in the sudden encounter of a healed wound from the time before you met. Tell me the story, I plead, as my fingers trace the the white, the silver, the red of the lines.

My first scar (and my first stitch) is hidden in the shadow below my bottom lip. I can still feel the sensation of my tiny, sharp bottom teeth piercing right through as I hit the floor after my little truck of bricks skidded away from me on the parquet floor.

The zigzag on the inside of my left ankle where the bookcase fell on my leg at primary school is barely perceptible now, but running repeatedly into the sharp corners of our dwarf wall (not on purpose I hasten to add, but in the course of many, many games of street football) has left little dents in the front of both my shins. Chicken pox marked me on my hip and my eyebrow - and has already caused the first blemishes on the peachy perfection of my little girls.

No one would ever notice the flat, smooth, paler areas on my face where moles were lasered away - and that’s the effect I was aiming for. My only vanity surgery. So far. I used to say Never but lately I’ve kind of veered towards Never-Say-Never.

The rest of my scars tell medical stories. The long, wide crinkled line down my left breast, and the strange emptiness beneath the skin where a piece is missing. Getting that scar at 14 was really hard, left me paranoid and hating that part of my body for years. Now the Frankenstein stitch marks and the puckered width of it have faded to an invisible silver, and relatively speaking, my cleavage is one of my finest zones these days. Time does indeed heal the wounds.

Everything else is below the belt, quite literally. Numerous explorations and laparoscopies can barely be noticed now across the ruined landscape of my once taut and concave belly. Alas those days are long gone: two Caesareans were no help there. The first left a fairly neat zip mark, but the second fell victim to a bout of MRSA and didn’t mend for two years. I wonder if I have marks, dead-centre, right on the spine, from the epidurals? My back aches there when I’m tired, when I’m sad, when I’m cold.

My latest soon-to-be scar is still a livid gash, barely holding together, across my thigh where a broken jam jar ripped through my jeans, and about an inch into my flesh. Strangely, in spite of its beginnings as a domestic accident, this is my very straightest, cleanest line.

If you could see inside, it’s much messier. Lots of scars visible from inner space - I’ll make for an interesting autopsy.

The traumas that hurt the most have left no physical trace - but sometimes still ache when the wind’s in the wrong direction; when a song comes over the radio; conjured by a smell, or a word, or an image glimpsed on the TV. All those brow-beatings have knocked me out of line.

My heart has been broken twice, bears its invisible jagged fault lines. But it mended well - time-healed - and its beat is strong and brave.