It happened in the garbage pile in front of our house in Mexico. Undoubtedly a beer bottle. Probably Dos Equis or Modelo. Definitely your fault. Cuts on the feet bleed a lot. I remember the pressure Mom applied, tying an old paint rag around my foot so strict I could feel the blood tighten my toes into thick, hot pudding. We never went to the hospital. You said Mom’s make-do job was just fine. Now, on the inside of my left foot, a white bird’s nest stretches when I arch my feet during good sex. I wrote a poem about the scar once—the way it sometimes glistens silver in the sun like a needle.

A vaccination scar on my right bicep. In the shape of a lamp. Or a mushroom. I’ll take either. From when the vaccination ladies pulled into our remote gravel driveway in Mexico and asked how many children were in the house. Mom said four, even though it was only my little sister, Eva, and my older brother, Peter, at the wooden kitchen table. My older sister, Anna, had already made a run for it. Probably behind the haybales or the tractor shed. The nurses showed Mom the needles and explained in Spanish what the medicine was for. You were on the field, harvesting soybeans, unable to translate. Mom had never learned Spanish. A proper Mennonite woman wasn’t to meddle with such worldly activities as learning the language of the outsiders. It was a miracle Mom trusted the good intentions of women that day. Maybe it’s even a miracle someone came to protect us at all.

Three croissant-shaped ones on my right hip. Chickenpox. I got them on the Greyhound bus we took to get to Canada. I was too young to remember why we left. You and Mom announced we were leaving for Canada on a Friday. Only a few days later, we were on a bus and gone. I scratched and scratched and scratched until my sores bled through my handmade dress. Blooms of red stained the purple floral fabric. You told me to stop, swatting my hand, but I was persistent. I didn’t see the damage until I had my first bath in Canada, dropping my right hip into the hot water. It felt like dipping half of me into a country I didn’t belong to.  But you said it would be worth it, and I believed you. You had a way then, already, of gambling on a future.

On the tip of my left middle finger. This one is so deep, it’s still sensitive to the touch. In our first house in Canada, the one you bought for us with a single, lucky spin of a slot machine, I was balancing on the edge of one of our dining table chairs. Imagine a bucking pony if it were a chair. Eva pulled the two grounded legs from under me, and I collapsed onto the floor. The weight of the solid-wood chair split my finger at the tip into a fleshy rose. Bled like a bitch. This time, I begged to go to the hospital. You insisted I was strong.  Instead, I kept a Band-Aid on it for months, refusing to let anyone look. Eventually, the scab fell off—a blue and black crust, reeking of cheese. Under it, a new fingertip appeared. Just like the last, except it had a white line separating the left from the right side.  A perfect border.

Right hand. On both my middle and ring finger knuckles. Little red ovals turned shiny and pearl over the years. I was working in the kitchen of an upscale restaurant after school, grades nine through eleven. These were the years I accumulated the most scars. Fryer oil splashes onto forearms. Cuts on every digit from every angle. You name it, I had it. These were also the years when I slowly started to understand you.

One Friday, a "Golden Ticket" hit the line: four apps, four mains, four desserts. Tips would be good, for sure. The appetizers went out smoothly. We always had the sides for the mains going at the same time. The sumac-marinated onions for the steaks needed another two minutes in the oven. Sliding the tray in, my hand scraped the top of the scorching metal on the way out. Everything from my elbow down to my fingertips went hot. The head chef, Chris, bandaged it and slid a latex glove over the mess. He called me a good girl in a thick British accent, so I finished the service.

I needed the drink bad that night. The bartender poured me a gin martini—it enveloped my mind like an umbrella I couldn’t close. This was always my favorite part of the night. After the floors were mopped, the kitchen staff were offered a drink to wind down. It was hard work, so we lapped eagerly. Pimm’s Cup. Lemon Drop. Bourbon. I loved them all. Loved the way I could giggle with the waitresses about the neediest tables of the night. Loved the lights in the restaurant, how they melted blue and fluorescent into the music. Loved the skinny stem of the glass in my hand, far cooler than the cigarettes my friends were starting to smoke in secret. Loved I didn’t have to hide my pleasure the way they did.

That night, on the walk home after my shift, my body blurred into the street. It was as though I had found a way to compress the distance between who I wanted to become and who I was. Isn’t that what we all dream of? To run into ourselves at night and be welcomed with open arms?

As I approached our front door that night after dinner service, I peeled the plastic glove off, and sweat dripped from the latex fingers.  My entire wrist was hot to the touch. But nothing hurt. You were in the living room when I stumbled into the house, Jack and Coke in your hand. Definitely not your first. I smiled at you with a shit-eating grin, and you smiled back.

After I moved out of your house, graduated and got a job in accounting, the scars on my hands, wrists, and arms became far and few in between. A different kind of scar was growing. An internal one. Often late into the night. So intense I would wake up on the bathroom floor, curled up like cooked shrimp, clutching my abdomen. I couldn’t see it, stroke its silver sheen. So I didn’t go to the hospital for the five years it was digging its claws into the lining of my uterus. No, I told myself I was tougher than that. I looked at myself in the mirror and furrowed my brows until they turned into two birds–free, just like yours.

You don’t know this, but last year, I went to the emergency room four times on account of my left ovary being sick. I gave the endometrioma a centimeter, and in those five years, it took seven. The doctor says seven centimeters is undoubtedly going to affect my fertility. He says IVF, like it’s a hot new trend, a side hustle “definitely worth looking into.”  Of course, the whole time I’ve been gritting, I’ve also been growing.

I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for being so strong.

A scar cannot grow a hair follicle. I discovered this when I started growing a beard. A dime-shaped patch on the left side of my chin remained smooth and untouched. As my endometriosis progressed to stage four, and the hormones in my body lost their balance like two lovers at a bar, my chin hairs grew thick and lush, in a perfect circle around the scar. The little mystery moon remains on my chin to this day. A white island of nothingness.

The truth is, everything reveals itself in the end. Nothing is ever unrecorded, even if it remains unwritten.

When I visit the gynecologist's office, there are signs on the wall about the measles vaccination. It’s coming back because people aren’t protecting themselves and their children. The flyer explains that a little of a bad thing is a good thing. I wonder if you think about your parenting like that. As if serving a childhood on a razor blade could force someone to grow a tongue of steel. As I write this, I have a suspicion it did.

What you probably didn’t expect is how the same tongue of steel that can find a way to survive in a whole new country can also write a voice into existence, using the sharpness you gave me to finally cut myself free. Free to be weak. Weak enough to feel the texture of my life with my own bare hands. Relish the grit of my life between my thumbs and forefingers.

I never made a decision to forgive myself. Or you. I think marking forgiveness as a “decision” is bullshit. If we’re lucky enough to come out the other end of forgiveness, it’s because of a goddamn miracle, not because of a choice. Some are lucky enough to experience it. Others have to walk around it like a wound, tending to its edges, cleaning it once in a while so it doesn’t get infected. Waiting until it scars over. Until it goes silver and silent.