Scars & Sanctuary - Personal Narratives

Scars

My mom sat on the sofa next to me, our bodies turned towards each other. She was leaning into the sofa cushions and fixing the bangs that kept falling into her eyes. She reached over to the coffee table and retrieved a bobby pin. She pinched it between her teeth, pulling the two ends apart, and quickly slid it into her hair to secure her bangs back on top of her head. She sighed and waited for me to start talking. I had left her a note on the double bed we shared. This had always been our "thing," because talking to my mom was one of the scariest moments for me; I never knew how she was going to react. So, whenever I wanted to tell her something, I'd leave a note for her to find when she came home from work.

I took several deep breaths, chuckling lightly as a smile stretched across my face, a nervous tick of mine since I was little.

"Honey, just tell me. You know I'm not going to be mad, whatever it is," she said patiently, sucking on her chewed and bleeding cuticles.

"Okay," I sighed. "I want to stay here with dad. I don't want to move with you to England."

I could already feel tears stinging my eyes, and I bit my lip trying to keep my chin from quivering. She looked taken aback, and there was an awkward moment of silence. She remained composed before replying, "Okay, baby girl. If that's what you want, you can stay with your dad."

Her figure became a blur as tears rolled down my face, my chest burning as I tried to gasp for air. She pulled me into her lap and rocked me as I sobbed into her chest, soaking her shirt.

"Shhh," she said, pulling back to make me look into her eyes. They were glassy, with a small pool of tears threatening to spill over the edges, but they didn't.

"It's okay, I'm not mad," she said, wiping away my tears as they fell.

In truth, I really wasn't afraid to talk to her because I thought she would be mad--I was afraid that she might say exactly what she just did. And now I was crying because I thought, perhaps, that she was going to change her mind, and not leave me behind. I held onto her tighter than I ever had that night as we fell asleep in the double bed we shared, the a/c blasting and the cool sheets twisting around our bodies, praying she would not leave me to follow her boyfriend across the world.

* * *

My obsession with scars began at the age of fifteen. I had just moved into my dad's house following the departure of my mother "across the pond," and I was feeling alone. It was still an unmercifully hot Californian summer, so I was wearing some pajama shorts and a tank top. I had not yet unpacked my belongings from my mother's house. They sat in a neat pile in the corner of the room next to my bare bookshelf. I was holding onto the unrealistic notion that my mother would show up at the door at any moment and tell me that it was all a sick joke, pull me into a mommy bear hug, and pack all my belongings back into the car she had sold.

I remember sitting on my bed, the bed that I had spent the last two days setting up alone because "I did not need anyone's help," looking at the white line across the top of my right knee. It was a scar, but it looked like someone had embroidered the line across my bony kneecap with needle and thread. It was only a shade or two whiter than the surrounding skin, but when pulled taut, like it was then sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce, it looked almost translucent.

I got that scar when I was probably four years old. My dad took my two older sisters and I rock climbing. This was not the indoor rock climbing where there are cables to assist you and chalk to help you grip the perfectly crafted handles; no, this was real outdoors climbing-up-piles-of-rocks rock climbing.

I don't know why or how, probably due to my natural affinity to falling and tripping, but one minute I was gripping the rock and climbing higher and the next I was sliding down the gravelly granite surface of a boulder. It was only seconds before blood started to pour out of my knee and I had reached the ground. I looked down at my knee before a flood of tears starting pouring out of my eyes, stinging my face as they fell. I cried as my dad carried me to the car. I cried the short car ride home buckled into my booster seat because I "didn't weigh enough to legally sit without one." I continued to cry even as my dad sat me on top of his bathroom sink counter. My legs stuck to the cool marble countertops and my body jolted with hiccups as he placed a cotton wad with antiseptic over the gash. He stuck on a Band-Aid that covered the entire length of my kneecap, and the ends wrapped around behind my knee. My dad put his hands under my armpits to pull me off the counter and placed me back onto the ground.