The Places Where It Hurt

Let me tell you about the healing. It does not happen fast. It does not happen easily. It does not happen without a little spilled blood: the blood on your hands, the blood will be all your own. You must be ready.

Let me tell you about the tearing. It does not happen slowly. It does not happen painlessly. It does not happen without you being ready to give up a little bit of yourself: you will need to rip into yourself, the way in which he ripped into you.

Let me tell you about the scaring. It does not fade away. It does not disappear. It does not let you forget. But, trust me on this — you will never want to forget it anyways.

one

I was pink with wonder, a newborn that’s red when she first appears on this earth. You could see that my wounds were still tender, that my body was trying so hard (the head and the heart whispering to each other in the middle of the night as I breathed heavily, my chest heaving up and down: we must help her get through this, we must help her come back to herself.)

My body opened itself up and the blood clots began to form scabs. New skin began to form over old tissue, and the wounds turned the color of buttery salmon: my blood vessels opened up, trying to heal me by funneling all the oxygen they could to the places where it hurt. White blood cells that come to fight off the infections, like knights on white horses, princes who came to save me from my very own thoughts that I couldn’t escape sitting in that room by myself all day.

A body that did everything it could to heal itself, even when you couldn’t see my wounds. To mend the things that don’t even appear to be broken.

When I was lying in the bed for ten days straight — don’t lie on your back they said, total bed rest— it was then that I realized that everyone has it all wrong. That the worst was over? Not exactly.

What everyone gets so wrong about trauma: the real pain begins only after you have survived.

two

The body is often kind. Yet the body is also ruthless. Wounds that it should have healed start to reopen. In the classroom. On the street. At the dinner table.

When I walked down the sidewalk and someone came close as they passed by: tear a little wider. Back in the school yard, having to run into the bathroom to cry so that I don’t weep in front of them: split down the middle. A year later, safe at home, when I am asked about what happened: rip, rip, rip.

I looked at myself standing naked in front of a mirror, some wounds I could see: the scars on my palms, the bruises on my hips. But where was the pain coming from? Somewhere else.

Are you trying to heal me or hurt me?

I searched my body for the hurt, but I couldn’t see it. Shouldn’t I have been feeling better by now? Instead, I was dehiscing, the way that milkweed splits into two down the middle where it is weak, allowing the pollen to fly free. And whom to tell when I had no slash across my body, no surgical staples, no skin sewn together by thread that I could point to and say, Here, this is where it hurts. Something is terribly wrong. Please tell me what’s happening.

Tearing is painful not because your body is betraying you. It’s not because the weak skin gets pulled apart. Or because the raw flesh under the layers of the still-young skin isn’t quite ready to be exposed to the elements.

It hurts because you begin to think to yourself: why did I survive at all?

three

Look down once again at those wounds. What do you see?

The skin lost its color around the place where it split into two: matured, aged, grown into something that has seen more than it could ever possibly describe to you. Not rosy and soft, but instead white and tough: hardening the way that I have: calcifying over time.

This is the part that takes the longest. The trying to cover it up so that no one can see it painted all over you. The hiding it from him, them, yourself. The wanting to pretend that it never happened. The I’m fine, I’m just like you. The I have no stories to tell.

The scar will be smaller than the original wound was itself. A shrinked-down version of what I thought seemed so unsurmountable, what I thought would never get smaller, never be forgettable, never be something I could move on from. Sometimes, it will nag at you. It will feel itchy and annoying and when I put on that silk black dress, I think that everyone is looking at the marks on my body.

When I lie there in my bed — my body actually allowing me to rest this time, no battles to fight or infections to fend off — I sink into a worry that tastes like salt and is made up of me wondering whether the scars on my skin will ever blend into the color of my skin. Or if instead, that I will be pigmented with the memory of things that I’d so much rather forget.

No longer am I pink and raw. I am hardened white, the color of cool marble that somehow manages to be calm even in the face of the midday sun. But look closely at me, and you’ll see that even stone is made of specks of sediment.

Let me tell you where to look for them. Don’t look for the scabs, they have long since fallen off. Don’t look for the bandages, you can’t see them. Look instead for the scars. The places where it used to hurt will tell you the story of all the things that we were strong enough to survive.