34. Top 3 Scars on My Body
1.
During the winter season, my early morning tastebuds love warm fruit. I’ll take apples, pears or baby bananas and cook them down in a pot with a few cloves, a stick of cinnamon, a dash of nutmeg and a bit of water. I’ll serve myself the warm fruit over a bowl of homemade coconut-hemp “milk” chia pudding. But prepping sweet fruit first thing in the morning, on an empty stomach, takes a level of commitment to my wellbeing I sometimes forget I’m due.
Clean, peel, chop…and then clean again. The warm fruit commands me as I subsist on the remnants of left-over spearmint from the morning’s mouth washing. Making breakfast for myself sometimes feels like some sort of karmic punishment. (What past life curse prevents me from having someone in my employ to cook and serve all my meals and snacks?)
“I’m worth the labor,” I say to myself every morning, until I’m convinced.
I sang this phrase like a Disney hymn one morning, while crouching over my kitchen sink, on the precipice of breaking a sweat. Using a vegetable peeler, I scraped slivers of skin off a Fuji apple into a bowl below. My stomach, not giving a fuck about my little sing-song affirmation, grumbled for me to “feed it now!” I paused to consider just biting into the apple and eating it as God had intended, when the strip in the razor caught my attention – it looked familiar.
Thin and long, the flimsy strip was shaped like a flat serrano pepper. I stared and scrutinized the dangling piece of apple.
Oh, I know where I know you from….
-
Having grown tired of my decade-long experience of being a human child, ten year old me decided to will myself into being something else: a dolphin. I’d failed at my prior attempt to become a mermaid. It was for the best, I reasoned. It was too fanatical of a desire. Becoming a mermaid was nonsensical…geographically.
I knew the waters of the Pacific well – at least the portion of it that stretches from the Palos Verdes Peninsula to the Redondo Beach Pier. I would swim or paddle out past the ocean’s breaking point, and tread water or lay on a board while waiting in vain for Yemaya’s people to scoop me up and indoctrinate me into her underwater tribe.
Mermaid peoples seem to prefer the warmer waters of the Atlantic (and possibly the Indian Ocean). Unfortunately for young me, I was stuck in the land vicinity of the cold, harsh and intolerant Pacific. Thus, my desire to become a dolphin was a concession. I’d hope for it to be an easy out. And I was half-way there, given that I am a mammal. But my body lacked other necessary components for dolphin-hood.
I prayed and prayed for a new body – one with new, slick appendages. And my prayers worked, sort of. God got the new body part right. But instead of giving me fins, God gave me puberty and (as a result) body hair.
“I need to be hairless,” I informed Mama. “I must glide through the water like Flipper. You have to shave me.”
“No-no-no-no-no,” Mama responded shaking her head. “We don’t do that. Your hair is your strength.”
It had never been clearer that Mama and I are from two different worlds. In my culture, hairiness was next to ugliness.
I was a competitive swimmer. The messaging I received from my swim team’s sub-culture conflicted with what I was taught at home. In the locker room pre- and post- practice; between sets while hanging onto the lane lines or gutters; underneath tents while waiting for our events at swim meets – the conversation between and amongst us pre-teen and the proper teens was that of the hideousness of body hair.
We chatted about whose bush was now peeking out through the crotch area of their TYR suits. We wondered how long the hairs under a person’s armpit could grow. We warned hairy people to be careful – the suction drains will certainly pull you down to the bottom of the pool by the hairs on your unshaven legs.
My fear of being ridiculed nearly matched the intensity of my desire to become a dolphin. I decided to adapt. I needed to shave my body on my own.
I didn’t know shit about shaving. I knew there was a plastic stick with a fat razor head that you glide over your body to remove hair stroke by stroke. I knew that a cream cloud, which farts out of a can, was an important part of the process. And…that’s all I knew.
Auntie and Mama didn’t shave (“It’s not part of our cult-cha!”), so I didn’t have access to any shaving cream. But I was able to find a disposable razor. Mama’s stockpile of hospital SWAG included a single-bladed, double-sided, white hospital razor with teeth.
One afternoon before swim practice, I excused myself to the bathroom, locked the door and decided to do a quick shave of my legs. I stomped my bare right foot on the top of the furry toilet seat cover and furiously rubbed a squirt of baby oil into my calf. I popped off the rounded hood on the toothy razor and held it against my skin atop my ankle. It took what happened next for me to learn I’d missed a crucial step: add water. (The irony.)
In the shaving commercials I saw on TV, water seemed like a suggestion, a prop, an innuendo. I missed the fact that an important aspect of shaving is that your skin should be well moisturized. So, when I dragged the razor up my leg, a strip of skin came off instead of just a strip of hair.
I looked from the serrano shaped strip of brown hairy skin, dangling from the mouth of the razor, to the exposed white meat on my leg that was turning red. “Oh, no-no-no-no-no.”
There was a lot of blood for me to clean up in the bathroom that day. So much blood that I was deterred from shaving my legs for years. And, by that time, I’d conceded to an even lower aspiration of who I wanted to be in this life.
I was never able to become an ocean swimming dolphin. Instead, I became a squealing, lifting, jumping and flipping pom-pom human girl: a cheerleader. I cheered competitively for my middle school whose mascot was – drumroll, please – a mutherfucking dolphin. (God’s sense of humor is grating, ain’t it?)
The flat, and now faint, serrano-shaped scar I carry above my right ankle is a reminder of what happens to a dream deferred. It indeed festers like a sore and runs.
2.
As a heterosexual woman of a certain vintage, I do not believe in giving men compliments. I have strong principles about this. I will only comment on a man’s inner or outer appearance if I think it’ll destabilize him in some way or hurt his feelings. It then follows that my attempts at flirting are a bit clumsy and not always well received.
Some months ago, I had an eventful evening out that I didn’t want to end. The night’s events brought me to the passenger seat of a man’s SUV at 4:00 a.m. (I first met this man while out with a friend early last year and have run into him randomly – or serendipitously? – on a few occasions since. I haven’t given him my number, so we share a see-ya-when-I-see-ya-but-I-probably-will-never-see-you-again type of non-relationship.)
The Macallan I’d been drinking put me in the mood to hear the waves of the Pacific Ocean crashing against the sand. He obliged my late-night request and drove us to a parking lot abutting Manhattan Beach. Waiting for the sun to rise, we chatted and listened to the ocean alongside the soundtrack of Andre 3000’s new flute album, New Blue Sun. All my favorite elements for a perfect night out converged.
At some point the man rubbed the spot of eczema that was on top of my left hand. It was a benign gesture that felt too personal. I don’t know the man like-that-like-that; definitely not well enough to give him open access to my rash patch. I inched my hand out of his grasp. But before I could remove my hand from his, he turned it over and ran his forefinger over my palm.
“Your hands are so rough,” he whispered over Three Stack’s flute. He grabbed my right hand to see if its texture matched. “You’ve been laying bricks, or something?”
He meant this as a joke, I’m sure, but I received it as a compliment. I blushed.
One of the things about being someone who’s terrible at flirting is that you find it endearing when you come across someone who’s even worse. It’s a launching pad for a fun conversation if the other person’s game. The back and forth often devolves into a heated exchange (How low can we go?), which nears on being feral. It tends to drop you deeper into your body.
-
My hands are part of an old party trick of mine: “Feel my palms.”
On sight, my hands give peak femininity (when not patched with eczema). My natural nails grow fast and thick. I keep them shaped and painted. My fingers are long and slender and move with a grace and precision as if in a prior lifetime they were a Russian ballerina’s legs. I have gorgeous, regal hands that look like they’ve never had to lift a crumb in their lives. My palms hold a different narrative.
The rough skin of my palms is a product of my childhood need to fling and throw my body. When I was around eight years old, I had the upper body strength of a Romanian gymnast. I enjoyed climbing, swinging, and pulling myself from and onto tree branches, poles, walls, or gates.
I depended on my often blistered and calloused young hands to conquer the metal bars on the playground at school. One day they failed me.
That day during lunch I decided to play on the mountainous monkey bars and mapped my game plan in my head.
I’ll go from here, to the top over there, by pushing my right foot on that bar, then jumping to grab that other bar, then swinging my lower body onto that higher bar. Then I’ll pull myself up and through that opening, where I’ll stand and touch the top and tower over everyone. Light work!
I made an incorrect kick-ball-change move along the way up. This caused me to second guess my footing, distracting me away from my hands. My grip slipped, causing me to rip open a blister on my hand, hit my face against a bar and then onto the asphalt below.
“Who jumped you?” asked my classmates as I walked the halls on my way to the school nurse’s office.
“Duh bihg bahrs,” I responded with my swollen, bleeding mouth.
A bleeding mouth is too much of a distraction for a third-grade class, so the nurse let me stay in her office until the final bell. In the meantime, I laid down on a cot, holding a frozen pack and a towel against my busted lip. At the end of the day, when I got on the school bus to go home, kids accosted me with questions about who messed me up. I tried to make a “you should see the other guy” joke, but my mouth hurt to move.
“Nuh one, ugh!”
You know those before and after pictures of kids on their first day of school that are popular on social media now? Imagine little me at the start of the school day in navy blue Dickies, a pair of brandless black and white sneakers, a white collared shirt, and a pale pink hoodie (“Before”). Now imagine me returning home from school wearing the same shit, but the pale pink hoodie was dirty and covered in blood (“After”).
I hadn’t looked in the mirror after I busted my face and couldn’t see below my swollen lips. I had no idea I looked like I’d been baptized in pig’s blood like I was Carrie being crowned at the prom. It wasn’t until I got off the school bus to meet Auntie that I knew something was wrong.
She was making the same face Mama made when I showed her what I thought was a convenient life hack: “Do you know if someone is saying something you don’t like, you can show them your middle fingers – like this – and they’ll stop?!”
And the same face Papa made when he walked in on me during one of my sea creature training sessions. I was standing in the middle of my room, facing the clock, timing how long I could hold my breath, with a plastic bag over my head. I’d tied it tight around my neck with a shoelace to keep myself honest.
“She-lah, what happened to you?!” Auntie yelled at me as I skipped towards her in my blood-soaked pink pullover.
“Muh-luhp!” I said pointing to my mouth. “Uh fehl.”
-
Having a hot conversation in a SUV, over a flute heavy improvisational ambient album, while watching the waves of the Pacific, and waiting for the sun to come up, inspired in me the desire to say some silly shit next. I wanted to descend into my depths – a perfect night cap.
“Guess how I got this?” I said in a whisper to the man.
Taking my elegant, calloused hands back, I placed the tip of my Bordeaux red, coffin-shaped nail next to the bump I now carry on my bottom lip.
“My mouth lost a fight with the big bars.”
3.
I was a night slasher. Blood smeared pillowcases and sheets were common in our household. I wanted to stop, but couldn’t. You see, the line between compulsion and habit is fine and dynamic.
For years as a child the last step in my nightly ritual was having my hands and forearms smeared with a white cream. It was cold and the texture of paste. Thick socks were then placed over my hands and pulled over my forearms. My parents tried their best to save myself from myself.
I had eczema dreams. They’re like fever dreams, but bloodier, because you have your strength.
“You were screaming in your sleep again,” Auntie would inform me in the morning. She was often the one to clean my fresh scratches, bruises, and blood. My entire body felt like a throbbing, itching, hot scab. I wanted my body to heal. Instead, it taught me how to fight to find relief.
I cannot remember any of my dreams, but I know I fought myself in my sleep. As soon as I was incapacitated with half of my face sunken into my pillow, in that deep languorous sleep that a growing child requires, I’d attack.
-
I don’t fight fair (not that I believe in “fair”). Try me. I’ll catch you off guard, smear steroid cream in your mouth and eyes, and peel off your epidermis.
I’m strong as fuck. Part of my strength, I inherited. I am descended from generations of self-sufficient farmers who spent their lifetimes under the tropical sun pulling root vegetables from the earth and carrying water collected from rivers. We are heavy handed people.
My strength is also merit-based. I’m a proficient scratcher. (I put in my 10,000 hours well before I was five years old.) Scratching is exercise for your fingers, so my fingers are a force. They are my power. My hands are my strength.
My parents thought I was done for when I caught the chicken pox. Mama threatened to tie me to the bed if I didn’t stop attacking myself at night. I called her bluff. I couldn’t stop; and didn’t really want to.
I carry two prominent indentation markings on the right side of my face from this time in my life when the eczema rashes had to share my skin with the blister-rashes from the pox. The horizontal scar between my right brow bone and my right eye, and the vertical scar on my cheek, are battle scars. They remind me of the amount of pain and discomfort I’ve had to hold in my body.
-
These scars, and the multitude of others I carry, in the aggregate, show me how good I am at keeping secrets.
As an adult, I’m often told that I have “nice” skin: great skin; beautiful skin; flawless skin. Look closer, I think. I snicker when asked what I use on my skin. You lack vision. The appearance of my skin isn’t the result of any essence, serum, or moisturizer. And while my go-to response is simply, “It’s my diet,” that’s mostly a lie.
The fact is there’s nothing nice about my skin. The truth of my skin is violent and painful. Want to know the secret to my “nice” skin? I scar easily, because I don’t scare easily. Blood is a welcomed bedfellow. I don’t mind scars and have the markings to prove it.
Don’t believe me? Let’s fight.