These Marks

A new entry has been a long time coming. I apologize to you, my blogger blog. I only stay away because it's so hard to find the time for more than 140 characters and as you well know, a picture is worth a thousand words. I haven't had the time or the peace of mind to accumulate even 50 words for you. Life isn't hard, it's simply busy. Apparently being an adult with a full time job, dinners to cook, friends to see, shops to ransack, and twitters to overload leads to less blogging time. I miss you, really I do.

Oh blogger, home of my sanity and insanity. Writing in you and there's a sigh of satisfaction in my very heart. You will always be my internet home. You will always the biggest indent into my daily life. And on that note on to a list, you know, to break the recently reconciled ice, about the marks upon my life. In a more physical sense.

My Scars:

• A small once inch long and maybe quarter inch thick, dark smudge on the inside, topside of my left wrist. Once when I was baking cookies I reached too far into the oven and burned myself on the top rack. I feel like wrists and forearms are common cooking/baking scar places.
• A small light colored dot, maybe the size of a standard "O" on a keyboard on my inner right thigh just above my knee. When I was maybe around 12 during the summer my aunt and uncle took me camping with their family in Yosemite. The second day I looked down to find this gross looking little bubble. Somehow, I managed to convince myself it was a tick burrowed beneath my skin. (what?! I had never seen a tick, ok?!) Rather than tell anyone and have them help me I decided to dig it out myself. After some prodding it popped and leaked some sort of liquid. Over time, in retrospect, I have come to realize that it was probably a burn blister of some sort. Maybe from the fire, it popped on me and I didn't notice. Maybe it was from the sun somehow. Either way, it wasn't a tick and the mark of it has never gone away.
• When I was 7 years old and we lived in San Diego my mom organized and held a company picnic for the place she worked at a park somewhere. To set the scene, it was a grassy area surrounded by concrete pathways. On the other side of this sidewalk like thing was a fence that surrounded the playground in a large sandbox. The adults had just finished a series of games like egg-walks, three-legged races, potato drops. They were now onto the infamous softball game. The sun was shining and it was just that typical, weekend in the sun 7 year old kind of day. A foul ball somehow ended up, with many cheers, flying into the playground. I went running yelling, "I'll get it! I'll get it!" I remember it all like a faded, vintage movie. I ran across the sidewalk, made a sharp turn to get around the fence, but the hot concrete was covered in sand. In a twisting sort of move I felt the ground rushing and suddenly I was sliding, sliding, sliding for feet. I was in shorts and so my bare thigh and hip took it all: the sand, the concrete, the heat. I remember us rushing home, stopping at the drug store. When finally I stopped screaming and the pain subsided we were home and it was time to have it cleaned. the rubbing alcohol and the rubbing to get the sand out of the wound was torture. At the time it was at least half of my entire thigh. The white of my tissue was showing through. This story is so long because it's pretty much, so far, the largest and most gruesome wound of my life. In the past 16 years the scar, as to be expected, has shrunk considerably. At this point you kind of have to look for it, in order to notice it at all but, it's there, a small patch maybe 1 in. by 1 in. on the outer higher edge of my left thigh/hip. Reminding me of what it's like to be 7 years old again.
• And since i'm seemingly going backwards in time, i'll talk about my next and last scar. I was 5, maybe even 4, so I'm slightly astonished that I remember it. This memory is much shorted though, don't worry. Although I admit, I'm not even 100 % sure if this is the right one. We used to have a glass table. It was a rectangle support in the middle and then just a slab of glass on top. My parents should have known better than to have this sort of thing around, but one day I just slammed my head against the edge of it, against the edge of exposed and cornered glass. I don't think that's the memory of it, but it very well could be. What I think it is, is one day, while leaving my little cousin's grandparent's house (from the other side of her family, not MY grandparents.) We were walking out, it was evening and they had 4 or 5 concrete steps after the front door. Everyone was turning around for last minute goodbye's and clumsy little baby Sydney just fell. Ker-plunck. More screams. I remember hitting my forehead square on the corner of the concrete stair. I remember bragging as it turned all sort of colors. Purple, blue, green, yellow. You know, the usual bruise regalia. And so just above my left eyebrow, very lightly, there is a small line and circle there.

So there it is. These are all my scars, and don't forget to keep this list in case I ever get murdered and mutilated so badly my face is indistinguishable. You can point me out by the barely there scars that are like little secrets.