Inheritance of the Scar

The roses came after.

This is the order that matters: first the wound, then the marking, then the covering, then the roses. The roses were not the beginning of anything. The roses were what you plant when the soil has been through something and you need to decide what grows in it next.

I decided roses.

I decided red.

I decided the needle, which is its own kind of violence and its own kind of choice, the chosen pain that covers the unchosen kind, and if that sounds like something a therapist would want to unpack I can tell you that it has been unpacked, thoroughly, by professionals with clipboards, and what they found at the bottom of the unpacking was not pathology but something more interesting: the specific, human need to author your own body after someone else has tried to.

He tried to.

I have roses.

That's the whole story.

Except it isn't, and the part that isn't is what I'm here to write about.

---

The initials were first.

I was thirty-one and in love in the way that thirty-one-year-olds are in love when they haven't yet accumulated the evidence to know the difference between love and the performance of love, between someone who wants you and someone who wants to own you, between a relationship and a long, slow education in what you are willing to survive.

I got his initials on my inner arm.

The placement was deliberate. Inner arm, the soft skin of the forearm, the visible-when-the-sleeve-rolls-up placement of someone who wanted to be marked and wanted the marking seen. I wanted to be claimed. I want to be precise about that, because the story of a woman who marks herself with a man's initials is easy to tell as a story of foolishness, of naivety, of a girl who didn't know better.

I wanted it.

I chose it.

I did not know what I was choosing.

I was choosing the outer symbol of an inner conviction that has taken years to understand and years more to replace: the conviction that being wanted required visible proof, that love was a transaction that required collateral, that the way to keep something was to make yourself into something that couldn't be returned without a cost.

I made myself uncollectable.

I thought that was safety.

It was a different thing entirely.

---

Here is what $uicideboy$ know about this that the therapy couldn't reach for a long time:

There is a version of pain that isn't the absence of love but the presence of it, the love that arrived in the wrong container, that was real and was also damage, that you carry in the body the way you carry all real things, in the tissue, in the nervous system, in the specific flinch response that misfires years later in rooms that are safe because the body doesn't always know it's safe and the body kept the original record and the record says: love and danger share an address.

$crim and Ruby make music that knows this.

Not politely.

Not with the careful, therapeutic language of a field that has learned to describe the body's emergency protocols without making you feel the protocol.

They make music that feels like the protocol.

Like the 3 a.m. of the worst year.

Like the specific, unmanaged frequency of a person who has been through something that doesn't resolve into a lesson on a timeline anyone else finds acceptable, who is still in it while they're supposed to be past it, who knows the difference between performed recovery and the real thing and has stopped performing.

I found them in the bad years.

They were the right sound for the bad years.

The bad years needed something that didn't ask me to be further along than I was.

They didn't ask.

They just: sounded like it.

Like knowing.

Like the wound before the roses.

---

The scars on my face are not tattoos.

I want to say this directly because directness is what the subject deserves and what I have given it insufficient of in the years since. The scars on my face are not something I chose. They are not art. They are not the chosen pain of the needle or the deliberate marking of the inner arm. They are what is left when someone else decides to write on you without your permission, in the specific, permanent vocabulary of violence, in the language that leaves marks you will see in every mirror for the rest of your life.

I see them.

I have always seen them.

In the early years I saw them the way you see evidence of a thing you are still too close to for perspective, which is to say: constantly, with the specific, exhausting hypervigilance of a person for whom the mirror has stopped being a neutral surface and become a daily reminder.

In the later years I see them differently.

Not without pain.

With the additional information of distance, which changes the seeing without removing the sting, which adds context without removing content, which is what distance does, which is why people always say you'll have perspective eventually and are not wrong and are also not telling you the most important part, which is that perspective does not mean painless, that the view from further away still includes the thing you're looking at, that the scar is still in the mirror, that you are simply, now, the person who can look at it and remain standing.

I remain standing.

Most days this is an act of will.

Some days it is just Tuesday.

The Tuesday days are the goal.

---

Diemonds.

My Flaws Burn Through My Skin Like Demonic Flames from Hell.

...And to Those I Love, Thanks for Sticking Around.

There are specific $uicideboy$ tracks that I played in specific years for specific reasons that I will not fully detail here because the detail belongs to the years and the years are mine and some of what is mine stays mine. What I will say is this: there is a lyric that lived in me during the bad years, that I carried the way you carry a song when the song is doing work that nothing else in your available toolkit can do, that was not about beauty or resolution or the earned epiphany of a person who has processed her experience correctly and is now prepared to share the lesson.

It was about survival that doesn't look like survival.

About being in the thing and making sound anyway.

About the specific, unglamorous, unkempt reality of a person who is not yet on the other side of it and is honest about not being there.

That honesty was the gift.

That honesty said: you don't have to be further along than you are.

You don't have to have the roses yet.

You can be in the wound and it can be real and it can be what it is.

The roses come after.

---

Here is the part of the story I have not told yet.

The roses exist because of two men.

One of them knows his role in the story.

One of them doesn't.

The first man is the reason the coverup was necessary. His initials on my arm, his marks on my face, his years of careful, patient work on the architecture of my self-understanding. He is in the before of this story. He is the wound. He is the soil before the soil knew it was soil, before it understood that what had been done to it was not the final word on what could grow there.

The second man is the reason I found Chris.

He knows what I was covering.

He knows the initials.

He knows what lived under the roses before the roses existed.

He sat with that knowledge the way he sits with everything I've told him: without flinching, without the careful recalibration of someone deciding what to do with the information, without the subtle withdrawal of a person who has just learned something that changes how they see you.

He just: knew.

And then he handed me the name of an artist.

Casually. The way you hand someone something useful without ceremony, without making the handing into a moment. Here, this person is talented, look at this work.

He showed me what Chris could do.

He sent me toward the reclamation without knowing he was doing it.

He knows the wound.

He doesn't know he helped close it.

He doesn't know that the recommendation he offered in an ordinary conversation became the most significant act of care anyone has extended toward this particular piece of skin in years.

He doesn't know he is in the roses.

That the roses exist at the intersection of the wound and him.

That without him, the wound might still be wearing the other man's initials.

I am not ready for him to know that yet.

But I am writing it down.

Because this is what I do with the things I cannot yet say out loud.

I plant them.

The way he, without knowing, helped me plant everything else.

---

The coverup took eight hours.

One session. One straight, uninterrupted eight-hour conversation between my skin and a needle and an artist who understood, without my having to explain it, that this was not a routine appointment.

Chris Miller works out of South Lyon, which means he works close to home, which means when the recommendation came it came for someone nearby, which is either logistics or the specific mercy of a universe that occasionally gets the geography right.

His portfolio told me what I needed to know before I sat in his chair: this was a man who was comfortable with the dark. His work — skulls with dimension, ravens with weight, bears with the specific ferocity of something that knows what it is — was not the work of someone decorating surfaces. It was the work of someone who understood that skin is a document and that what you put on it should mean something proportionate to the permanence of putting it there.

He also did roses.

His roses had the quality I needed, which was not decorative, not the roses of a Valentine's Day gesture, but the roses of something that grew in difficult soil and is not pretending otherwise. Heavy and lush and saturated, with the depth of color that only comes from a hand that knows how to build pigment the way you build anything that needs to last.

I showed him the initials.

I showed him what I wanted over them.

He looked at both for a moment with the specific, appraising attention of someone who is calculating not just the technical challenge but the weight of the request, who has been in this business long enough to know that some coverups are not just coverups.

He said: yeah, I can do this.

He said it the way people say things when they mean more than the words.

I sat in his chair.

---

The needle is honest.

I want to say this because it is one of the true things I know about the experience of chosen pain, the pain that you sit down for, that you pay for, that you ask for and consent to and endure for a reason you have decided is worth the enduring.

The needle is honest because it hurts in the specific, present-tense, fully-physical way of a thing that is happening to your body right now, that cannot be managed into a smaller size, that requires your full attention in the way that psychological pain frequently does not, that has the mercy of being a pain with an end, a pain that will stop when the session stops, a pain that is producing something.

I have endured a pain with no end.

I have endured a pain that produced nothing.

The needle, in comparison, is the most honest transaction available.

It says: this will hurt.

It says: it will be worth it.

It says: you chose this.

It says: here are the roses.

---

Eight hours is a long time to be in a chair.

It is also, it turns out, exactly enough time to understand what you are doing and why.

In the first hour you are managing the pain, finding the rhythm of it, the way you find the rhythm of anything that is going to require sustained endurance. In the second and third you have found it and you are in it and the conversation between you and Chris settles into the comfortable, focused register of two people who have agreed that the work is the work and it deserves their full presence.

He worked the way his portfolio suggested he would: with the methodical, unhurried precision of someone who has done enough of this to know that rushing produces nothing worth keeping, that the density of red the coverup required was going to be built layer by layer or not at all.

He did not make it precious.

He made it serious.

There is a difference and it mattered to me more than I knew it would until it was happening. Precious would have required me to perform the significance, to hold the meaning out for examination, to be in the session in the way of someone at a ceremony. Serious meant: he understood and he worked and the work was the acknowledgment.

Hours four and five: the red arriving in layers, the specific red I had chosen, which was not the red of romance or the red of Valentine's Day sentimentality but the red of something older, the red of the rose has thorns, the rose knows what it is, the rose grew in this particular soil and grew anyway.

Hours six and seven: the saturation building, the old thing becoming invisible not by being removed but by being overwhelmed, layer by layer, intention by intention, until what was underneath was still technically there and was also, functionally, completely gone.

Hour eight: Chris sat back.

I sat forward.

The initials were gone.

Not removed.

Overwhelmed.

Covered by something I chose.

Something that grew over what he left.

---

The scar on my face is not covered.

I want to be honest about this because the essay would be easier if the narrative were: I covered the tattoo and I found the language for the scar and everything was transformed by the roses. That would be a better essay. That would be the essay with the clean arc, the earned resolution, the roses as a metaphor that resolves the whole of the wound.

The scar is still there.

The scar will always be there.

The roses did not reach that far and the roses were not asked to.

What the roses did was this: they gave me back one surface.

One piece of skin that used to say his name and now says mine.

One piece of body that used to be his argument written on me and is now my argument written on myself.

One choice.

In a situation that, for years, contained very few of those.

One choice.

The roses were the first of the reclamations.

The reclamations are ongoing.

The scar is still in the mirror.

I remain standing.

The roses are on my arm.

---

Ruby said, in a song I played on a night I don't need to detail here: I've been living in the dark for so long that the light hurts my eyes.

I played it because it was true.

Because there are years that are the dark, that are the wound before anything grows, that are the initials on the arm and the marks on the face and the specific, total education in what you are willing to survive, and in those years the music that tells the truth about the dark is the only honest company available.

And then there are the roses.

Not instead of the dark.

After.

Because of.

The soil that has been through something grows differently.

I know what my soil has been through.

I grew the roses in it anyway.

Especially because.

Especially in the specific defiance of a woman who has been told, in the most permanent vocabulary available, that she is someone else's, and has decided, with the full authority of a person who is done being told:

no.

My arm.

My face.

My soil.

My roses.

My red.

---

The needle chose me back.

That's what it felt like.

The choosing going both directions for the first time in a long time.

Me choosing the roses.

The roses choosing the skin.

The skin choosing to hold them.

The body, finally, on my side.

Doing what bodies do when you give them something worth holding:

holding.

The initials are gone.

The scar remains.

The roses remain.

I remain.

All three of us in the same body, the wound and the covering and the woman who decided what grew here next.

She decided roses.

She decided red.

She decided: this skin is mine.

The needle agreed.

The roses agreed.

And somewhere, in a conversation that felt like nothing, in a name offered like a gift he didn't know he was giving,

he knows the wound.

He doesn't know he helped close it.

He doesn't know he is in the roses.

Not yet.

But I am writing it down.

Because this is what I do with the things I cannot say out loud.

I plant them.

The way he, without knowing, helped me plant everything else.

The soil knows.

The roses know.

When I'm ready, he'll know too.