A History of Scars

The physical pain began registering again gradually as I recovered, as adrenaline stopped pumping through my system. One nurse gave me the wrong sort of bandage to apply, despite my request for the nonstick variety, so I found myself peeling off the gridded gauze that had begun melding with my exposed skin. That hurt a little. Over time I began accepting help, and I remember one kind nurse using a pipette to first clean the wound, as I lay propped up on my stomach, commenting that gravel was still stuck in the abrasion a week after the fact, before carefully taping nonstick pads over it. You probably would’ve punched me if I’d tried to do this when you came in, she said with a smile. Okay, not really—but you wouldn’t have let me help.

* * *

The morning after the first time we slept together, she’d already asked me about the scar on my elbow. After a shared breakfast burrito and tall stack of dessert pancakes drizzled in white chocolate and salted caramel, we went to the gym, happy, yet too stuffed with food to climb well.

What’s that from? she asked, as we stood next to each other, her on belay, me ready to climb. I didn’t know, at first, what she meant, had forgotten the scar was even visible. She gestured to my elbow and repeated, How’d you get that?

An accident. A fall, I told her.

Climbing?

No.

I left it at that, but I knew the question had already been raised—not from brevity, but from body language. Our communication style thrived on the unspoken, on sensed emotional undercurrents.

When later in bed, her fingers stroking my back, she felt something on my skin and asked what it was, she felt me tighten up, too. That tension louder than if I’d simply answered. At some point one’s unwillingness to share information becomes a bigger obstacle than the information itself. Yet evasion feels easier.

It’s from the same thing as the scar on my elbow, I told her.

How long ago?

Six months, I answered. I realized later the inaccuracy of my estimate. Six months hadn’t yet passed.

When dating, one doesn’t really like talking openly about trauma—it’s not sexy. I fell back on that as my excuse. She and I had talked of trauma before, of her unwillingness to read sad stories with unhappy endings or discuss trauma at length, versus my habit of dwelling in and writing trauma narratives. Her desire for silence allowed for reprieve.

Still, my friend saw the feelings I was developing, and she advised me to share specifics sooner rather than later. You don’t want to trap her as your girlfriend, she told me.

That verb choice, trap, did so much work in confirming my fears. My friend had already admitted that she did, in fact, view me differently after learning of my episode, that she worried about my perceived emotional fragility. I didn’t want those I entered into relationships with to feel that same burden of caution, in relating to me.

I knew she cared about the present tense of a relationship, not one’s previous mistakes. I don’t hold people’s pasts against them, she’d told me. Yet I’d long held the opposite philosophy—that the past and present are intertwined, that one can only truly know a person by understanding the environments they once occupied, and the influences that shaped them.

Perhaps I felt this way because I’d always been surrounded by illness, mental and neurodegenerative and physical ailments, in those I loved. Given my diagnosis of PTSD, I wondered if, without the damages absorbed in childhood, I would have had a breakdown in the first place. I knew all too well the unintended harm caused to bystanders, and the unintended damage caused by silence on such topics.

* * *

Even as I, too, wanted my life to return to what it once was, I’d been surprised at how quickly the world expects one to move on. I was familiar with this phenomenon as a bystander to my oldest sister’s recovery from multiple cancers. I was familiar with the idea that just as emotional recovery was becoming possible—once finished with treatment, once entering remission—was when one’s support network typically fell away.

Yet it still surprised me, to be back in charge, teaching a new class, steering the metaphorical ship, when only eight weeks earlier, I hadn’t been trusted to wear pants where the elastic hadn’t been snipped out, or use full-length pens to write, or step outdoors, or have the yellow “fall risk” bracelet removed from my wrist, or skip the fifth group therapy session of the day, or possess a watch, even a strapless one, or, or.

One day I received an email from a student, thanking me for making class so much fun that he looked forward to attending each day. On the same day I received a statement of review from my car insurance stating “Diagnostic code: T14.91, Description: suicide attempt” alongside the breakdown of drug tests, brain scans, panels, and assays completed. These documents serve as an interruption, a reminder of severity. You’d like to move on, but six months later, you’re still getting those documents in the mail, just when you think you’ve finally finished with the paperwork and closed that chapter of your life.

These things all coexist. And yet. When you’ve reached the point of no longer caring if you live, of willfully throwing yourself in harm’s way, it takes a minute to recalibrate to the idea of forward motion. To remember that life doesn’t stop on a highway, but instead rolls on. Time’s passage feels both short and long. How, within six months, does life change from one thing—utterly desperate and out of control—to calm?

* * *

The idea of having yet another aspect of my identity which I will continually have to “out” myself on and explain, as with my queerness, or when discussing family with those who assume that everyone springs from a happy, healthy, nuclear family, exhausts me. It exhausts me to realize that I will have to disclose and await reactions from every serious lover in my future, rather against my will, teetering in doubt and uncertainty as to whether the truth behind my scars is enough to make others walk away.

Certainly it will become easier over time. Still, questions of how to handle such disclosures arise. Do you treat future lovers like the infamous frog, where you slowly turn up the heat until they’re too relaxed to jump out of the pot? Or, as with an ice bath, do you just shock the system and dump all the details at once? And if so, when? On the second date, by the fourth? Before sleeping together? After being exclusive, but before having official partner status? When is fair to both people involved?

* * *

The first time I saw her cooking, breakfast omelets and potatoes outdoors, we were camping in Jackson Falls. She joked about the photos I took of her, as unfortunate proof that she did indeed know how to cook, despite her preference for eating the cooking of others and then, in turn, taking them out to restaurants. What I noticed was not the act of cooking, but the way she held her paring knife: the way she bunched up herbs and pinched vegetables in her palm, then exposed the sharp end of the knife and used her forefinger and thumb to guide the blade’s path. It’s a practiced motion—if one slips, the knife enters directly into the fleshy part of one’s thumb. It’s the Asian way of cutting vegetables. Seeing her cutting that way, and hearing her say, it’s faster this way, reminded me of my mother. My mother had that skill, too—of peeling an apple more smoothly and quickly with a paring knife than with a vegetable peeler. It’s a skill I don’t possess.

You’re so polite, she told me, as we got into bed together for the first time. It’s positively un-Amer

ican. In case I couldn’t read her tone, she added on, That’s a compliment. It’s a good thing.

When I first saw her, I hadn’t realized that she was Pakistani, two years removed from Pakistan, not Pakistani-American. As someone who grew up being mistaken for a non-American, I would rarely make such an assumption about another person. Yet I could feel how much we had in common, in terms of cultural upbringing, by virtue of both being Asian, whether South Asian or Korean-American. I had the odd certainty, upon first meeting her, that we would remain in each other’s life in some capacity, regardless of whether in a romantic context, and part of that instantaneous connection involved shared cultural inheritance.