Writing Prompt #8 How’d you get that scar? Most everyone has a scar. Talk about it as if it you were about to get that scar for the first time. Scar free? Then you need to invent one! Or talk about another person’s scar as if it was your own.

Oh, at the scars I have. I guess the most unpleasant one is the deep tissue muscle scar I got when I was 16 or 17, when my horse accidentally kicked the dog snot out of me when I released him back into his field. He didn’t mean to, I know. He got me in the head, too. And NO, that isn’t what caused me to act this way. I was already crazy. And no, I didn’t know why it didn’t knock some sense back into me. Anyway, the scar was on the inside of my right thigh, visible through much of my twenties as a half horseshoe shaped indention. Then I got fat and you can’t tell it anymore. So is it still considered a scar? Would it come back if I lost a bunch of weight? The world will never know, because I’ve eaten eight chocolate chip cookies today.

I’ve also got a scar on the top of my foot from where my water glass fell off my dresser and busted and a shard sliced right into me. It hurt like the devil dickens and I had a field visit to go on that day. I bled through my boot and never said a word. I did go get a tetanus shot a few days later, though, because I was going to the beach and you know how nasty saltwater is. I should have gotten it stitched up but I didn’t so here we are.

The worst scars are the ones you can’t see and I’m covered in them. All the scars I carry on my heart. As we all do, from people we love that have hurt us or that have left us, and sometimes both. Scars that remind us to forgive, but not to forget. Scars make us tougher…but I do wonder if the heart is meant to be scarred…wouldn’t we be freer to love if we didn’t remember the last time we got hurt? Would the love be purer, fresher?

I dunno. Sometimes I feel like an ol’ junkyard dog, matted and mangy, skulking and distrustful, with bared teeth and pieces of ears missing from long ago fights. Other times I’m a tattooed nymph, flitting away before I can be caught in my mischievousness, rubbing a spot where the arrow nicked my backside again. And sometimes I’m just Amelia, jaded but willing to try one more time. Sighing as I apply mascara, knowing it’s no use, my glasses shield my eyes from anybody who might give a second glance. What’s one more scar on this heart of mine? What am I supposed to do, sit around waiting on something to happen to me? Nah, kick start and throttle down. Might as well get a broken bone or two. It makes for a more impressive story.

They say love is a battlefield. So what is a war?

Kickin’ and a-gouging in the mud ‘n the blood ‘n the beer~Johnny Cash

Tattooed and scarred in Appalachia,

~Amy