I have a lot of scars, both on my body and on my soul. Some of them are very deep, I look at them and I remember the person that I was when I got it, am I better off from having that scar? Am I a smarter and more well-adjusted person because of it? Some of my scars are scars left by other people, some of the scars are left by me, or a person that was me but no longer is.
One of my scars was left by one of my dead best friends. His name was Ethan and I will never be able to forget him. His presence and his memory cling to me like a ghost, whenever I see or hear something that reminds me of him I remember that I’ll never be able to share another memory with him again. Whenever I hear “In the air tonight” I remember us watching the trailer for Dead Space 3 in the back of his mom’s minivan and getting excited over it even though neither of us would ever play it. Whenever I think about Halo I remember the promise that I made to him that if I ever got an Xbox that we’d play Halo together, I will never be able to keep that promise. Ethan taught me something that I had heard before but never fully grasped until he died. Everyone carries scars and wounds, everyone is hiding a sadness from you. Ethan has cursed me to think about the scars and sadness that people I see every day are hiding from me.
I wish that sometimes I could forget about things, but my brain is cursed to instantly forget some very important things, but eternally remember other things, usually painful things. I can remember every single second of the last time I saw my great grandmother before she passed away, and when I see something that reminds me of the moment I am instantly transported to the moment and remember what I was wearing, what we all said, and what eye my mom started crying from first. It was the right one.
Those scars litter my body and when something bumps into one of them and reminds me of its presence I am forced to remember every detail about how I got it. Sometimes it’s a little scar, a mark on my leg from when I tripped at work and fell into a metal cage. Sometimes it’s a bigger scar, a mark on my soul from when I was going to ask my crush to a school dance and walked into her kissing her new boyfriend in the hallway.
Someone I really respect named Tim Rogers who I hope never reads this said something that stuck with me in a review of The Last of Us. “A scar is a body part.” He was attempting to emulate Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but something about the quote really stuck with me.
A scar is a body part, and they're a lot of different types of scars, and everyone has some.