Scars

Scars can define a person, tell you where you've been, what you've seen. They last a lifetime, always reminding you of where you've been, where you've come from.

She studied me with her innocent blue eyes, taking in my face as if looking at me for the first time. "Oh, what happened here?" She gently traces the scar that divides my left eyebrow into two distinct sections.

My eyes lose focus as I think back to that night. It comes upon me suddenly, something I hadn't thought or dreamed of for years. My fists slowly clench as the memory becomes more vivid, until I am reliving the moment again and again.

I was four or five years old, I vaguely recall that my parents had once again left me behind with relatives while they took a weekend trip somewhere. I know I was watching TV, but the exact program escapes me, that wasn't important. What comes rushing back is the sudden panic I felt, as I suddenly had to urinate with extreme urgency, the way only a little kid can. I rushed to the bathroom, ripping at my pants in a desperate attempt to avoid wetting them, after all I was grown up, not some baby to be wetting their pants! The urge to pee was becoming excruciating, which made me all the more clumsy trying to un-buckle some Popeye cartoon belt that was designed by some devil spawn for the sick purpose of making kids wet themselves.

Finally though I acheived victory with nary a drop staining my pants. While I was rescuing my pants from infamy however, my victory was short lived. While I did succeed in freeing myself from my pant prison, my trajectory was thrown off. Instead of a clear steady shot into the toilet, the propulsion sent a stream straight up, making a thousand tiny rainbows as the soft bathroom light reflected through each golden prism. While I stared in awe I did not notice the pool quickly forming around my socked feet. As I stepped forward in an effort to right the errant flow, the socks succeeded where my pants had failed, and I slipped, falling face foward and cracking my skull against the rim of the target toilet bowl.

I do not recall much after that, other than my Uncle yelling about piss everywhere, and my Aunt slapping a band-aid over my eye. I rememeber the painful peeling off of the band-aid later, as it seemed determined to remove every hair that formed my eyebrow. What the band-aid left behind was enough to show the bloodly split that now effectively gave me three eyebrows. It tooks months for my eyebrow to grow back and start to cover the scar, until finally I barely gave it a glance when I looked in the mirror.

She had brought that memory back however, and I was taken back to a different time, a different place.

"Did it hurt when it happened, does it still hurt?"

I put a finger to her lips in a shushing motion. "It doesn't matter anymore, some battles are best left in the past."