Scars

When you’ve been through the struggle of reevaluation and looked back on it with a newfound perspective, it’s easy to feel that it is over and done – behind, in the past, safely finished with. But, ah, naive self-congratulation, the past cannot help seeping into the now, creeping underground with wisping tendrils rising to curl around your toes. The past is rarely done with you, for it forms your now and your future. It is what you walk upon in the present.

I thought it tucked away, put to bed. That I had dealt with, adjusted to, worked through, reconciled with, made peace with that cloak of differentiation that chafed as I wriggled out of it like a drying too-small skin.

As I had changed, I imagined a parallel change in others, and the thought comforted me. For surely birth pangs are lessened in their sharing?

So it surprised me, I will admit, that I tripped over the stump of hurt and found that my wound bled excessively. I exclaimed at the bright flow, caught unprepared. But all things that live and grow carry with them a fragility. Sometimes we forget, and think we have moved beyond our scars. Yet the fading marks cling to us, and remind us to remember. They tenderly recall the pain which coexists alongside joy, patchworking our souls into their textured beauty of experience.