The Scar I Stopped Hiding
One summer I wore short sleeves, and nobody fainted, including me.
For nineteen years I owned exactly one swimsuit, and it had sleeves. I told people I burned easily, which was true in a way... just not the way they thought.
The scar runs from the inside of my left elbow down to my wrist, a raised pale rope of skin with a hook at the end, like a river on a map of a country I never wanted to visit again. I got it three weeks after my seventeenth birthday, on Route 9, in my brother Danny's Civic, in the rain. He walked away with a bruise from the seatbelt. I went through the side window when the truck clipped us. Neither of those facts was anyone's fault, and both of us spent two decades acting otherwise.
The hiding started in the hospital, actually, before the stitches were even out. My mother stood at the foot of the bed with her coat still on and said, “We'll get you some nice cardigans, sweetheart. People stare.” She meant it kindly. She meant it the way she meant everything, as armor she was issuing me from her own supply. My mother has spent her whole life managing what people see, and she is very good at it, and it has cost her more than she will ever admit at a kitchen table.
So: cardigans. In July. At graduation under a polyester gown, at the beach in a rash guard, at my own wedding in lace sleeves the seamstress and I designed around a lie. Long sleeves became such a habit that they stopped feeling like hiding and started feeling like taste.
That is the really dangerous part of concealment, the part nobody warns you about.
Do it long enough and you forget it was ever a decision. You just become a person who is always slightly too warm.
Danny never mentioned the arm. Not once in twenty years. He mentioned everything else, my haircuts, my terrible taste in men, my worse taste in football teams, but his eyes had a way of stopping at my shoulder like there was a cliff there. We loved each other around the scar the way you rearrange furniture around a stain.
The summer everything changed was not a brave summer.
I want to be honest about that. It was a heatwave.
Last June the temperature sat at 104 for eleven days, my building's air conditioning died, and one morning I stood in front of my closet, dripping, staring at all that noble cotton, and something in me simply refused.
I put on a sleeveless black dress that still had the tag on it from 2019. I looked in the mirror for a long time... The scar looked back.
It was so much smaller than the version I carried in my head.
In my head it was a billboard. In the mirror it was a piece of handwriting.
Then I walked to the farmers market, arm out in the world like a rumor, and waited for the gasp...
Here is the complete list of what happened: a man asked if I was in line for peaches. A dog sniffed my knee. The sun landed on the inside of my elbow for the first time since the Bush administration and it felt like a hand resting there.
Nobody fainted. Nobody stared.
One little girl at the peach stand looked, the frank up-and-down look kids give you, and asked, “Does it hurt?” Her mother started the horrified shushing, but I crouched down and said, “Not anymore.”
And I heard the words leave my mouth and thought... oh. That's true. When did that get true?
A scar is just skin that decided to stay. The hiding was the only part of me that never healed.
That night I could not sleep, partly the heat, partly something looser and stranger, like a window unpainted shut. I sat on the floor in front of the fan and did something I had not done since high school, which was write. I had been lurking for months on a poetry site, reading other people's guts, and there was a prompt that started it all, eight words I had scrolled past a dozen times: Write to the part of you that stayed. I wrote to the arm. It came out in one sitting, no crossouts, forty lines, the truck, the rain, the glass, my mother's coat, the cardigans hanging in my closet like nineteen soft alibis.
I did not show anyone for a week. Then I showed the one person the poem was secretly for.
I drove to Danny's on a Sunday, in the black dress, on purpose. He opened the door and I watched his eyes go to my shoulder and then, for the first time in twenty years... keep going.
He looked at the whole arm. His face did something complicated, and then my big brother, who has cried in front of me exactly twice, once at Dad's funeral and once when the Bills lost in overtime, sat down on his own porch step like his strings were cut.
“I thought you hid it so I wouldn't have to see it,” he said. “I thought you were protecting me.”
“I thought I was embarrassing you,” I said.
Twenty years. Two people, one scar, and a complete translation failure the whole time.
We sat on the step and I read him the poem off my phone, voice shaking, and when I got to the line about the seatbelt bruise he made a sound I have only ever heard from something wild caught in something. It was not sad, exactly. It was the sound of a weight being set down by someone who forgot he was carrying it. I had spent years thinking forgiveness was a thing I would someday formally hand him, a document, a ceremony. It turned out it was just my bare arm on his porch railing in the sun while we split a warm beer and argued about the Bills.
The poem is out in the world now. I put it up where strangers read writers nobody had heard yet, under my whole real name, which was its own second unveiling. A woman in Glasgow commented that she has a scar on her jaw and wore her hair over it for thirty years and read my poem at her kitchen table and then, that same afternoon, got it cut. A bob. She attached a photo.
I do not know her... I think about her constantly.
My mother still winces, gently, when I show up sleeveless. Last month she touched the scar at Sunday dinner, one finger, like testing a cake, and said, “It's not as bad as I remembered.” It is the closest she will ever come to an apology, and I have decided to accept it in the currency offered.
By the end of August my arms had tan lines for the first time in my adult life. The scar does not tan. It stays pale, a stripe of lightning down my forearm, and when the summer light catches it now I do not think of Route 9 or the rain or the glass.
I think: there you are. You stayed. You got to see the sky after all.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.