how to address a scar

I didn’t expect you to be here this long.

I was in math class, grade ten and you were just supposed to keep me from jumping.

When James B. told my best friend, Drew in 12th grade, that I should just kill myself already, you kept mocking me with your inability to go away.

I didn’t know you’d grow louder in the summertime, from sun baking you into a starring role on my arms.

My mother remembered a commercial for a cream that could be rubbed on scars to vanish them away. “They may not disappear completely,” she said, “but at least they won’t be so visible.” I cried that night, realizing how forbidden you are.

I was dressed in just skin and water, in a bathtub that belonged to me due to monthly rent payments and name on mailbox. When I was a kid, it was the water, which washed away my chalk drawings; I thought maybe it would wipe away the carvings on my hips too.

Hello. Yes, I remember the first time. And I also remember Rachel, from the mental hospital, teaching me other ways to push myself off ledges after all the sharps have been taken away.

No, I really meant it when I said that I find scars sexy, because it is a reminder we have given ourselves permission to falter.

Age nineteen, I am in the only car I ever owned—a green Honda Civic I titled: Quentin Antoin McKenna. At the gas station, the attendant looks at my forearm as I hand him a ten-dollar bill and he makes a comment, which reminds me there is no escaping this billboard of sadness.

I am engaging in an activity that some people call sex and the one pressed against me grabs my wrist and rubs callused thumb against what is raised. Calls it braille. Asks to read the rest of me.

You twitch each time you see others like you. Thunder against my skin knowing how similar we all are. How sad we all are. How in need of other languages we all are. How loud we all are. How brave we are. How desperate we are to survive and yet desire to die we all are. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How. How.

what it is to lose

When I was thirty-four, I lost my mind. It had been ten years since the last time, and I found myself ransacking my bedroom for the map—torn up and burnt—which would guide me toward my bearings.

Outside, the air was gathering up its new identity. Its nametag of Winter had been removed and thrown away; it was now calling itself Spring. The yellow daffodils, though beautiful, were just confusing to me. All I could see and feel was emptiness.

The last time, which was not the first time, I was twenty-four.

The first time, which may have not been the first, was when I was newly sixteen.

I have lost my wallet once, dropped during a bike ride in Boulder, Colorado. But a considerate Samaritan returned it to me, several hours later. They knocked on my front door and handed it to me.

I lost my favorite red scarf somewhere in the Museum of Natural History during the first week of January. Then, I found it near the photo booth by the bathrooms. A few months later, I lost it for good somewhere in the halls of a community college.

Losing a mind is tricky. You can’t exactly retrace your steps or ask a friend to ask their friends to keep an eye out for it. You certainly can’t put up fliers or ask the subway conductor to make an announcement:

“EXCUSE ME, PASSENGERS, A LOST MIND, WEIGHING IN AT ABOUT THREE POUNDS WAS LAST SEEN IN CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN WEARING A NAVY BLUE SHIRT. PLEASE CONTACT LOCAL AUTHORITIES IF YOU LOCATE THIS MIND.”

When I lost my mind at sixteen, my mother found me. I was sliced up and unconscious. My mind slowly crawled its way out of my body. I was gathered up and sent to stay in a hospital for twenty-one days.

I was confused how I would retrieve my mind in a place that caused me to lose it even further. It grew blurry and the signal was weakening. I was around others that encouraged me to remain lost. I was given tiny capsules to swallow that slurred my mind into curious shapes. My appetite, that I coveted, was lost as well. It simply vanished, leaving me bony, translucent and weak.

Six years ago, I lost a brown, corduroy cap, which I had borrowed from my then-girlfriend. I left it somewhere between a thrift store dressing room and a bike ride throughout downtown Denver. That night, when I told her of this loss, she cried. It had been in her life for a long time, with memories stitched into the fabric, visible only to her. She asked me to go and look for it. By then, it was nighttime and all the lights had been turned off, but I jumped on my bike and began retracing my steps. I begged the moon to point me toward the direction of this hat, but it was barely a sliver of light that night. When I got home, we mourned the loss of her hat and slept in silence.

When I lost my mind at thirty-four, it was due to various factors colliding. It felt like a gang-bang of bad news. I had lost my partner, then my therapist, and the dark in me was growing like persistent ivy all throughout my body. I could feel my sense of direction weakening. Food, which once gave me such pleasure, was making me sick. I couldn’t chew. My skin was beginning to show imprints of my wandering mind. My white skin with old scars was turning red with new scars. My tongue was no longer being utilized and my spit dried up. I may have stopped swallowing; what was there to swallow?

One day, on my thirty-fourth year, I awoke deciding to no longer search for it. My mind was gone and I could feel myself slowly slink away, like a snake slithering out of its skin. But I was not looking to regrow anything. Instead, I was ready to disintegrate.

When I was somewhere between eight and ten, I lost a moccasin in a brook behind my best friend’s house that we weren’t allowed to wander in, so I couldn’t tell anyone of my loss. I can’t remember how I explained my arrival that night with one bare foot. I can’t recall if anyone even noticed.

When I lost my mind, no one asked me if I wanted help looking for it. People don’t tend to talk about this kind of loss.

I got it back. My mind. My skin of scars. No more new ones though. I’ve given up on the pills, so I’m free from the side effects. I’ve got my appetite and my voice back. I wouldn’t say I feel complete ease that I’ll never lose track of my mind, but I’ve hoarded enough maps to make sure I’ll at least find my way back to it sooner, if it tries to bail again.

(can you) LIKE this?

When I was a junior in high school, I liked a boy called G. I was too shy to ask him if he liked me the way I liked him, so I gave him my Enya CD before class one day, because I had overheard him saying he liked her music.

He smiled and took it, but never really said if he liked me or even the album and I have a scar on my right forearm from the day I drove to that park somewhere between where I lived and didn’t and cut my skin until I felt touched by something.

Grade ten in high school and I am told by my best friend that while he was in the gym locker room, a bunch of other boys were making fun of me. They said they wished I had just killed myself already and I began to wonder why my friend was relaying this to me. He said, “I defended you,” because he liked me, even though no one else did. Four more scars were born soon after.

First grade. A boy called D passes a note to me via three other people and asks me if I like him back. He gives me a choice: Circle YES or NO or MAYBE. I circle all three; even then, I had a difficult time making up my mind.

Nowadays, we are LIKED at least once a day, sometimes ten or thirty depending upon how often we ask through typed-up messages and photographs. We unravel our scars, dig them out like time capsules and put them up onto our computer screens, so that someone will press a button and deliver validation we’ve grown to thirst for.

Nowadays, we walk around with instant validation. All one has to do is post words and wait.

LIKE.

LIKE.

LIKE.

Two minutes pass and you’ve acquired three and then two more and suddenly your lack of employment or depleted bank account or untreated-but-diagnosed depression does not matter.

You. Are LIKE’d. Simply because you posted words above a button making it very easy for others to press it.

You tell people you have grown sick or gone to hospital or stopped eating or what you are eating or how you sit or how you lean or the delicate drip of your nose or who you are dating.

You tell people about what you just did or what you are about to do or what you plan to do next week.

LIKE.

LIKE.

Nineteen years of age, I am swallowing a boy’s body part that does not feel safe or comfortable in my mouth. He did not ask me if I LIKED this.

Year twenty-seven of living and I leave a place that I never recorded after my body is broken into once again and there is no button, but if there were I would not press it.

Seven years later and I try it out. I gather up some words like a bouquet of flowers stolen out of someone’s front yard. I take these words and thrown them onto a computer screen. And I wait. And I hold my breath until the first….

LIKE.

It feels good. Adrenaline of acceptance rushes through me and suddenly it does not matter how much I meant what I wrote. It doesn’t matter that I never spell-checked or fact- checked. All that matters is someone LIKE’d it, which means someone LIKE’d me.

And all my scars began to faint away or I pretended they had and it did not matter I was alone or lonely or hungry or still depressed. Someone pressed that button for me.

LIKE.

I take all these LIKEs and crush them up. I press down firmly to smooth out the hard bits. Like gristle. Suddenly, I’ve got a fine powder of LIKEs. I lean toward them as though about to whisper something worthy of a click to them. I get so close, I almost blow some of the LIKEs away. Then, I glide this dust toward my nose and snort them up like the drug it really is. I inhale. My chest beckons. My ribs climb themselves. I inhale every last drip of LIKE that exists and revel in the aftertaste of anticlimactic emptiness.

 

day 5: admittance.

I admit it was never the cats. And I’ve only been part of a gang of humans protesting body’s rights, but never part of a gang that initiates through bartered bruises. I admit it had nothing to do with the boy. Or the girl. Or that time that time. I can’t tell you who taught me, but I promise I never instructed another. I admit I’ve done it since the first time and I’d be lying if I told you there is a last time.

I admit this is not my real hair color. But what is really real on bodies?

I admit that I finally believe that the word love is not a noun or a verb. It is too bold to be a part of speech; it is the whole thing.

I admit that I sometimes write in library books because I have a difficult time not getting involved with words.

I admit I lie about my weight. And sometimes my age. And the strength of my wrists.

I admit I hold deep conversations with myself in the bathroom. And when I walk toward and away from places.

I admit I am difficult to learn. How could anyone possibly get in if I barely have entrance.

I admit I never really forgave you.

I admit that the most beautiful sight I have ever seen is the moon on a Friday after that evening nap and the moon when it still exists in the sky during early morning and the moon on Wednesdays when it is at its fullest figure and the moon when it reminds me of the fingernail I have torn off, which dangles between my teeth.

some body that i used to know

This has been the longest relationship I have ever been in. I can celebrate over three decades of this partnership; yet, I’m still trying to come to terms with what we actually have in common. In the morning in my nude, I am reminded by what I have. I am not haunted by all of it. In fact, there are some parts to my body that make me want to take it out to dinner and forego sleep in order to get to know it even better.

We’ve slept beside each other every night for over thirty years. We’ve been joined by another, though these were the times I lost track of its shift. You see, bodies never remain static. They shift in shape and desire. Sometimes, our bodies get loud enough in this displacement that alteration of clothes or vocabulary are not enough.

Initially, when we meet someone, there tends to be that immediate attraction that either let’s you know this is a possible friend or future love interest. Then, there are the ones we meet that remind us to keep walking. We cannot be expected to get along with everybody. When things don’t work out with someone you love, you break up. When things don’t work out with your body, it is far more difficult to walk away.

Recently, I was trying to explain my relationship with my body to my dad. He has seen me poke holes through various piercings, distract my skin in ink with tattoos, and alter my appearance with hair color and wardrobe. He wanted to know why I’ve been so afraid of the word, pretty. I stood beside him in silence trying to understand why he thought this and if he is right. Why might I be fearful of this simple word?

Beyond this adjective, I think about the parts of me that might attract such a word. Often, I am approached due to the boldness of my hair: knotty, red curls. My responses range from thank you to complete silence. Perhaps I shun this word because I prefer that my intellect and poems get approached, rather than the curvature in my hips or the flames in my hair.

As I officially slide into my mid-thirties, I recognize that I have been cheating on my body. I think of other bodies when we are together. At night, when it is just us in bed, if I am not too tired to be intimate with myself, I imagine my shape as something else. Not quite male, but not exactly female either. How to describe this?

Over five months ago, I started wearing a binder. There are many different versions to choose from, but the one I purchased is kind of like an extremely form-fitting tank top, that flattens my breasts and slurs away my curves. I’ve worn sports bras that have a similar effect, but I wanted something that completely smoothes them out. In addition, I have acquired a few more of various lengths and fittings.

My relationship with my breasts has been tumultuous like most love affairs. I desperately wanted them and then once they finally arrived, I eventually wanted nothing to do with them. Over the years, this detachment has grown more and more. Wearing this binder has been an experiment; I wanted to see if it would help the way I viewed my body. Now, I notice the way my button-down shirts, held captive by double-windsor tie and vest fit so smoothly over my paved chest.

Recently, a complete stranger called me handsome. When I was called this, I thought: perhaps this is how I am expected to feel when I am called pretty. Funny how letters pressed together have so much significance to us.

Here comes the possibly confusing part: I do not desire to be male and I do not view myself as transgender. If I must label, though I prefer not to, I see myself as gender non-conforming, genderqueer, and transgressing though consonants (M/F).  

When I was fifteen years old, I started treating my body like a tree. I began carving my way in and through my skin, searching for a way out. I soon learned this behavior was called cutting and I also learned I was not the only one. Many years went by and the wounds healed, replaced by scars. As I made my way through adolescence and into young adulthood, reactions from lovers and strangers ranged from looks of pity to obscenely rude accusations and questioning.

Summertime in New Jersey at nineteen. I am filling up my green car, scratched up just like me, and as I pay the guy, he says: Yo, what happened to your arms? Why they all marked up? At an open mic at twenty-seven. A young poet approaches me after exchanging no other words with me throughout the night, grabs my left forearm and says: These markings are so beautiful. Were they part of an art project or performance?

In the beginnings of these self-induced hieroglyphics, my mom suggested vitamin E and other scar-reducing creams. I got angry with her, though now understand that she just wanted to make it easier on me. Humans have a difficult time with scars. They immediately want to know how they got there and then they want to know if there is a chance more might arrive (depending upon circumstance).

I refused the cream because a large part of me wanted to be reminded of these markings and these years of sorrow inside my body. I am no longer a cutter, though have relapsed a few times in recent years. When I look down at my arms and the few ghostly markings on my hips, I think of these lines as words. What was I trying to tell myself? I want to believe that I was digging my way out and toward the innards of not only my gender but the core of my self.

How true is this body? What will it take to fall back in love with it? Have we ever been in love or has it been like an arranged marriage? Would I choose it if I could?

If we all came with our own airbrush machines that the fancy fashion photographers clearly use, I wonder what parts we’d compress away or enhance. Would I leave my scars alone? Would I flatten my breasts out permanently? Would I leave my dimples, otherwise known as skin deformities? How about dead-ends left on every strand of my hair due to forgotten haircuts? Would I want my thin lips to be fuller and my collarbone to be bonier and more dramatic?

We exist in these bodies that grow and shift in ways we accept and in ways that can be deeply confusing and even painful. Some things can be controlled. If that extra weight on your belly overwhelms you, then a few months at the local gym or daily sit-ups may flatten it away. If the skin on your face sags in a way that disturbs your ability to feel pretty, you may choose a face-lift. What isn’t big enough, you can now make bigger. What is not small enough, you can pay someone to take away entirely. No one can really say what isn’t necessary, because no one is inside anyone else’s body but their own.

It’s not that I want to break up with my body. We’ve been through so much that I feel like no one else could possibly understand me in the way that it does.

It survived that faint from the deeply traumatic panic attack at age twenty-seven that left me with several cracked teeth, a scratched up face and nine stitches. It survived mental illness and more suicide attempts than I could possibly keep track of. It survived drug addiction. Deep into the night, it has begged me to remain. My body has allowed me to orgasm even when shadows of sexual trauma have crept its way in. My body has given me more love affairs than one should be warranted in a lifetime. My body has remained even after all the walk-outs (my self included).

However, even after all these years, there are still times like now, where I feel like we are still getting to know each other. I no longer wear dresses or bras with a clasp in the back. I prefer much simpler attire. Sometimes I have to remind it that what I wore last year may no longer feel right against my skin. So, we must unhang, fold and give away what no longer matches how I/we feel inside. It is not too late.

I want to give myself time with this binder just as I gave myself decades in these scars. I’ve learned to come to terms with the discoloration of skin on my body: war wounds from the battle between my body and me. This disconnection I have with my breasts may not be flattened away with assortment  of binders. I may need to move forward and make a more permanent choice. My fear of telling others obviously ends here.

The need to speak out has been modeled to me each time I hear a poem or read a story that moved me enough to write or speak up. We all have these bodies that encapsulate all these stories. If we continue to speak up, more languages will form. More and more humans are realizing that they’ve been living in the wrong body and finding ways to rebirth themselves into their truest form. There is absolutely nothing more powerful than that.

 

(Thank you, Imogen Binnie for breaking my mind open with your transferring language, relocating my thoughts in so many directions with your incredible book: Nebraska. Other gender warriors: Ivan E. Coyote, Dhillon Khosla, Carter Dyer, Kate Bornstein, Tahrah, S Bear Bergman, Dylan Scholinski and the list continues)

 

Dear Elizabeth.

I recently learned that you kicked out one of your students because she was exhibiting strange behavior. You told a thirteen-year old girl with visible sadness and markings of warning signs not to come to school. Since when do elementary schools have a policy that pushes out the mentally ill?

When I was fifteen, I rubbed Plath and Dickinson into my skin. Could not compare how I felt with the others around me. So, I wrote. Carved poems into my notebook. Carved letters and lines into my skin. No one taught me how to hurt myself. It was a language I gathered with each collected tear drop. Poetry wound up [in many ways] saving my life, but it also turned up the volume to my invisibility.

Freshman year of high school, I read my first poem to an auditorium full of 13-18 year olds. I don’t remember the title, but it was so dark, the lights lost their balance and afterwards, teachers started worrying for my safety. This was the moment I realized how powerful words can be. I carried a book of Lou Reed’s lyrics with me and reread all the poems by Plath that made my skin feel like it was finally getting nourishment. The school guidance counselor started making appointments with me. The bloodied hieroglyphics on my skin were getting noticed. I stopped hiding.

Even in my saddest state, no one ever asked me to leave. When I walked out on classes because I needed to retreat, to lose myself against trees or carve out my grey into park benches instead of myself, no one stopped me. When I missed over forty days of classes because I needed to medicine myself toward something more safe, I was welcomed back without judgement.

Now, I’m the teacher. And I notice every student in my classroom and help them to feel and be present. I would never close the door on someone trying to learn. Especially someone having a difficult time remaining with themselves.

There is a school in Elizabeth, New Jersey that recently asked a thirteen-year old learner not to come back. I think that if every school pushed out those having a difficult time with living, we’d no longer have to worry about over-crowded classrooms. We’d also have a shortage of teachers and (probably) administration.

Kicking people out is not the solution. Giving them a safe space to talk is.

It has taken me almost two decades to manage and understand my sad. I have finally located the root, so now I work everyday to create and find safe spaces to translate it.

Elizabeth, New Jersey, I am disappointed in your approach to mental illness and unwillingness to look at this young girl as a wake up call. It is difficult to be alive sometimes; punishing someone because they are having second thoughts about it will only perpetuate these behaviors, not help to solve them.

wound collector

We met on a heatwave where our freckles floated right off of our bodies and it took several blocks before we could find a sturdy bench to house all of our moistened, loose skin. She asked me questions like: when was the first time and how long before the last and what feelings did it release in me and how does it feel when people touch them or ask about why they exist.

I rested each arm– one at a time — against the cold, soiled concrete ledge. She wanted to know about my tattoos and loved the way that they appeared like sliced-up stories on my flesh. She kept apologizing for her camera. I told her that I no longer apologize on behalf of my bones, so she shouldn’t have to pardon the plastic used to point and click me into focus.

All of these things are how they are supposed to be, I said.

She photographed my creases. The places on my forearms and wrists where I tried to disconnect. I was going to mention my hips to her, but they were so quiet, I forgot all about them. While I remained still, the mosquitoes took advantage of my sugared sweat. I watched welts pop up like internalized kernels, which began to itch my skin into a new color.

We stopped calling this summer a week ago, I screamed out to the slender flies. These scars are mine; they are not meals, only poems now. 

This was the second time today I converted my scars into sentences.

Before we parted, we hugged and I wonder how much scars weigh and which one of us is heavier. She told me the color of my red is so beautiful and suits me. I wanted to tell her the aroma of her history moved me in a way that would drip into many poems to come.

there is beauty in the ridges of your forearms

Here is the thing:

I don’t really spend much time “getting ready”.

I don’t own a brush and because of this some knots have formed. Some, I’ve recently cut out. Some, I leave because the stories are too massive to slice off of me.

I do own a mirror and it reveals the entire length of my body, but it’s more of an acquaintance than a best friend/soul mate. I am often told I don’t match.

I recently learned shoes must match the rest of the outfit.
This is difficult to aspire to when I only own one pair of black converse high-tops.

Oh, and stripes do not match other stripes.
I’m still not quite sure I agree with this one, so I tend to rebel against it.

Next month, I am performing beauty.

That is, I will be singing some songs that have arrived during bike rides, during moments when I am alone and just want to turn myself into a radio or self-contained Broadway show.

I will be reading text: memories, poems, declarations of my own beauty and what is seen.

What is queer beauty?
How do I want my beauty to be seen? To be known? To be heard? To be remembered?

So, as I continue to write this piece, I find myself thinking about beauty a lot .

* * *

I see a human.
This human is dressed in black and piercings and scars.
How do I not notice the scars.
Am I supposed to not notice the scars?

And they are beautiful.
And suddenly it feels like this human has skin made out of mirror-flesh and I can see myself in her.

This human spreads her wings or arms and begins to poem.
I watch her watch us watch her.
And she is beautiful.

I would like to take the power away from this word because it doesn’t sound strong enough or it has too many visuals attached that are not relevant to my version/interpretation of beautiful.

Airbrushed humans = not beautiful.
Skinny bones starved and gasping = not beautiful.
Flesh that is wrinkled or tattooed and painted or pierced. Flesh that is devoured by languages and stories = beautiful.
Ignorance = not beautiful.
Openness to all kinds and removal of all labels to make room for the in-betweens = beautiful.

Recently someone asked me about performance.

Do you normally do that on stage? I wish I wasn’t so self-conscious so I wouldn’t be afraid to do that.

That is defined as performance art/ as my body climbing a naked man, attempting to force him away/ binding him and taunting him/ angrily mounting him.

I don’t often think: I am going to take my clothes off now. It happens because the words push them off or my emotions force them away.

So, I answered:

I’m entirely self-conscious and I believe many people are. But I let go of that once I hit a stage. If I am too worried about my stretchmarks or cellulite, I’d never go nude.

Stretchmarks and cellulite = beautiful.

Or if I waited for my stomach to get flat like floorboards or six-pack of highly defined muscle, I’d never take my top off.

Bellies that are curvy and folded like Victorian fans = beautiful.

This is a continuous language. A discovery that doesn’t end.

Self-discovery = beautiful.

And when that self-discovery never forfeits……when we leave room to re-define and re-name, that is most beautiful of all.