Beauty in the Scar

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five, he writes “Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.” The birds are chirping and it feels inappropriate, wrong, sinful. So many moments of this journey. My body massacred itself. My uterus ruptured into my bladder. But the birds kept chirping, the children kept laughing, and people kept talking about the weather. I didn’t know if I would be broken for the rest of my life, if I would have to wear Depends topped with toddler-sized diapers for the rest of my life, if there would be a rest of my life.

The thing about bodies is, we often think of ourselves in one body. After having four kids, I didn’t have the body I had as a 23 year-old. But when I thought of myself, when I imagined myself in some scene, it was always in that 23 year-old body. And in some ways, it was a goal. I could get back there. I could be a size four again. But now, I could never have that body back. I had a scar. I was a scar.

When I was in high school, I had a physic’s teacher who was terrible at erasing the board. I could hardly read her new notes because the old notes were still peaking through. But as she erased and rewrote, erased and rewrote, erased and rewrote, those initial notes became fainter and fainter even though they were still there. That chalkboard was like a palimpsest. A palimpsest is writing that has been erased to make way for new writing, but if you look hard enough you can still see the old writing.