Straight No Chaser

Overwriting

pick a scar, any scar.

mine runs diagonal from just underneath my right breast to the inside edge of the floating ribs on my left side. it is fairly new but very faint; fingernail-induced, pencil-thin and the otherworldly color of heath bar toffee. should not appear in nature, and yet, does, because he put it there.

but this isn't a story about that; it's sort of a story about marcus, who discovered it with, ironically, his damaged finger (reduced to ninety-percent sensitivity after he severed the tendon and earned eleven stitches, yet still able to find an entirely textureless sliver of damaged skin). he found my imperfection with his own and gobbled it up--i swear it was less noticeable after he kissed it.

in doing so, he destroyed my stupid notion that i was never going to be rid of that ugly thing. i had always understood vague concepts of the body, that it grew and shifted and changed, bearing all sorts of incredible shock value (see hips, age thirteen), but the removal of my scar proved what i'd till then overlooked--that the body is in a constant state of dialogue with itself and with others; that, for whatever length of time he touches or holds, we share its ownership.

at puberty, i thought i was eternally doomed to grow and maintain my own carbon copy of my mother's non-chest. i was pretty much right, and to make myself feel better i also decided i'd be gorgeous like her someday, look thirty-two at fifty, darken and streamline and stand as my own testament to how well black women age. i apologized to him, early on, and in poem form, for not having bigger breasts, but promised to arch my back, occasionally, and to compensate in other ways. which i did, or tried to do, until he pointed out how utterly ridiculous that was.

it was the same day he found the scar, which i still tried not to let him see, because i hated the idea of being doubly deficient. they're small, and it's permanent, i told him, referring to each, respectively. sorry.

you, he said, tracing it with his soft brown frankenfinger, are the only person i know who apologizes for being gorgeous.

boobs are still tiny, but are therefore, i'm told, a less formidable barrier to my heartbeat.

scar's still there, but it's his, now.

that's my scar story.