i stood in the bathroom and peered into the mirror while i checked for imperfections: large pores, unplucked hairs...
and as my fingertips gently grazed over my skin, i remembered for some reason. remembered my last boyfriend and his hands on both sides of another girl's face. i never saw it, but he told me over the phone. about her skin. about how she didn't want him touching her face because he might cause an imperfection. he told me how he liked that.
for some reason, while my fingers were pressed up against my cheek, i went back there. my heart remembered and ached the same way it did 6 years ago.
and more memories came, faster than the ones before and they played like a montage in a movie. scene after scene, ones that only i could know and still pick apart from the millions of others, even this many years later.
where i was standing in my mom's room while i listened to him on the phone tell another girl how much he liked her right after we became "official."
the pit in my stomach as i would lay in bed on those nights when i wasn't enough. nights when i would cry myself to sleep waiting for him to call and sickly mornings when i was greeted by a phone screen with no missed calls and no unread text messages.
the ache in my heart after finding a series of sexual messages between him and a much younger girl. i sat on a bench outside of san juan high school in my white t-shirt and brown shorts. i sat and waited for the begging apology that would never come.
the blur of the text messages on his phone in between my tears. text messages to another girl he swore meant nothing. text messages where he inquired what was on her mind.
more often than not, those things feel like a past life to me. i am forced to believe in reincarnation because what else can possibly explain the transformation between then and now?
but then something as simple as touching my own face brings it all back and the pit in my stomach assures me that i lived through those things. i survived. and while i can't be positive, i have to think that i had to endure all that to get to where i am now. to who i am today, in this very moment.
and i am reminded that, as much as i'd like to wish it all away, the scars still remain. some still sensitive to the touch.
in 2007, i wrote a poem about those scars. i wrote about how, while it was painful to get them, they mean i have lived. they mean i am alive.
and that's what i thought of as i stood staring into the bathroom mirror.
the God i serve promises to make all things new. i believe that. i have seen it in my own life and the lives of others. but for now, these particular scars remain. they may fade with time, but there is no promise of them disappearing until forever. i'm surprisingly okay with that.
because without them, i might forget that i am not as healed or as whole as i'd like to think i am. i am not as strong as i may appear to some and there is still pain and healing beneath the surface.
i think, for the most part, i'd like the scars to stay.
because like the scars on my knuckles from my near-death car accident, they are proof of everything i have been rescued from.
and those are things that i'd like to not soon forget.
0 comments:
Post a Comment