Scar Tissue

I’ve got a running list of signs that I’m trying...
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The callus on my ring finger from decades of holding my pen wrong,

the scars across my chest from incessantly picking myself bloody,

the raw flesh in the back of my mouth where my molars like to work out stress,

the incision scar from a surgery I got in an effort to love myself,

the pathways in my brain that open up distant rooms for me to slip into,

the numbness that creeps in behind my face whenever someone yells in my direction.

My body has tried tirelessly to correct itself,

to erase what I’ve put it through, to erase what he put it through, to erase what it’s put itself through.

Every inch of me is a sign that I’ve tried,

but you can never fully remove scar tissue.

There are no self-care tips that can make you love yourself,

to love the version of you that life has molded you into.

But I have a huge gash on the back of my heel from attempting to jump a fence in middle school, and I remember my friend asking through tears of laughter, “Oh my god, how is there so much blood?”

We were laughing so hard that it didn’t even hurt.

I have that callus, from the lengthy handwritten notes I've been penning to loved ones since the age of six.

The pads of my fingers are thick and tough from the violin strings I plucked as a child.

I have sun spots from an exceptionally bad sunburn I got in Charleston when I was twelve.

I have a small hole above my bellybutton from a mistake I insisted on making as a teenager.

My wrists click from years of interpreting sign language.

I have the tools right inside of my brain—a sense of humor carved directly from life’s most difficult experiences—to provoke laughter from people I love. And is there any better sound in the world?

I’ve got a running list of signs that I’m trying, and an even longer list of signs that I'm still the little girl I look back on so fondly, with her sunburns and hobbies and impulsive piercings. I'm just the older version of the girl I so fiercely protect. She's in there, tracing the same scars, confronting the same demons, rubbing our sore wrists thinking, I can't believe we know sign language. She doesn't see what I see when we step in front of a mirror; she can't get past how grown up we look. She's in there, laughing along at our jokes thinking, look at how many people are happy we're here.