The body keeps rewriting the past

scars, memory, inheritance

Sam Badmaeva – skin

I have scars. All of us do. Some were made on purpose, others happened along the way, during dares or small accidents. Some out of defiance, others by mistake. Some are so old I barely see them anymore. Others remain invisible unless you look for them, like the one on my scalp. In summer they show more clearly, pale against tanned skin. Slightly uneven. Sometimes freckles form over them. I have scars older than my memories, from before my conscious life. They belong to me, even though I don’t remember how they happened. Do I belong to them? Small marks. Places where something happened.

A moment in Corsica. I was about two years old. I lost my balance and hit the back of my head on a stone. A dull sound. Then blood everywhere. My mother still says it was one of the worst moments of her life. I was right in front of her and she still couldn’t catch me. I only know the story from the way she tells it when we speak on the phone. The scar is on the back of my head, about three centimeters long. We didn’t go to the hospital, but there was a doctor at the campsite.

Another scar sits at my temple. I slipped from a trash bin next to a gutter. Rough exterior wall. 1995. I don’t remember what I was doing up there. Back then I often tried to fly. I still do. The same year I slipped on a toy car and fell through the glass of the balcony door. No scar. My knees carry marks from falling down the small slope in the garden. Once I wanted to see what would happen if I kept my legs tucked in until I hit the grass. Maybe to see if the world would give way. It didn’t. A mark remained on my right knee.

There’s a larger scar on my left arm, where I was pushed onto a broken glass bottle. A house party. Stitched too late, probably to seem brave. First attempts at fitting in. Two centimeters at the right hairline, glued. A metal window frame on a Sunday morning. Nothing heroic. And the dares. Cigarettes pressed onto skin. Friends changed. The scars remained.

Some people have surgical scars. Brain surgery. C-sections. Marks from procedures that saved or changed their lives. Others carry scars from wars, like our grandparents did. Wars they did not choose. Then there are the annoying scars. I have one on my index finger, in the nail bed. It keeps tearing open. I cover it with bandages. A nail infection on New Year’s Day. A visit to a surgeon. Yellow-brown doors. Exit signs. The smell of disinfectant. One week of antibiotics. One hundred and fifty years ago I might have died from it. What a trivial way to die, I thought. I had two nail infections that winter. The doctor said it was just bad luck. Statistically, I should be fine for the rest of my life.

Eventually I noticed something else. There are times when I show my scars, and times when I hide them. I have so many that I sometimes come up with excuses, for example at the dermatologist. Perhaps because I worry that a doctor might read them. Scars can be intimate. Usually no one asks. But the people who ask, stay. Some of those scars I know well. Others still surprise me, as if they don’t fully belong to me. Some are worn with a kind of defiance. But I don’t know against what.

And then there are the marks you can’t see. Deeper traces under the surface. In the way I think. In the shape of my moral ideas. In the fear that stings when the phone rings at night or someone says my name quietly. That fades too. Many things lose their origin. Sometimes I notice a scar I had forgotten. It wasn’t there yesterday, or I simply didn’t see it. The skin shifts slightly with the years. Lines move. What used to be a straight cut becomes uneven. As if the body keeps rewriting the past in small corrections. There are days when an old scar aches for no reason. No change in weather. No injury. Just a quiet reminder, as if something in the body refuses to close completely. What remains are paths into the undergrowth, half overgrown…The body keeps the record. We only add the story.

My father likes to talk about barbed wire in southern France, about a night with a French woman, about car accidents and the scar on his eyebrow. He is proud of his scars, maybe a little too proud. For him they prove that he has lived. If you hit your head, at least you know something happened. But there are subtler scars. Hardened skin on the palms. Cracks that remain. Resistance against forgetting. Against time.

And yet we forget. And are forgotten. And so much stays forgotten.

I don’t know my grandparents’ scars. There was a lot before my time. Life left marks everywhere. In the worn wood of the attic stairs. In my grandmother’s face. In my grandfather’s dissatisfaction. In the sentences he could never take back.

Inherited scars. Quiet ones. The kind that come from advice meant to protect us.