I’m looking for a soap dish. Knowing perfectly well that I’m probably rummaging in the wrong place, I pry the circular top off a stenciled craft box on the high shelf of the bathroom closet. It’s an old jewelry chest full of broken chains and strings laced with beads, unmatched earrings, a small butterfly shaped ceramic case which used to hold my mother’s wedding rings. Among these artifacts are three fabric necklaces, chokers I haven’t worn in years. I take one out and study it my hands. Hey, remember this? Remember the costumes you dreamed up trying to hide that silly scar?
The choker is dusty blue, about an inch wide, machine woven in a comfortable uniform pattern, thinner and flatter than rope cortege, secured at both ends with silver bands, a few ring extensions and a lobster clasp: adjustable. Its twin is black, and a third version is a thin zig-zag, like trim binding from an old sewing kit. I try this one on. As it’s supposed to, it chokes me.
When I woke in the hospital twenty-five years ago, there were a lot of things to figure out: what happened to the summer; what about college; who are all these strangers; how many animal names starting with the letter M can I remember in 20 seconds. There is a girl who stares out from a Polaroid who bears a close resemblance to my 19-year-old self. She has very short hair, an acne starscape on her face, a forced smile with vacant eyes. She wears a blue knit top with bateau neckline which does little to hide a very red, very prominent scar above the breast bone, below the chin, dead center on the throat. She hates it.
I have no memory of how the scar came to be. Its story is completely blank. I remember a fever in June and I remember a new Christmas dress. Everything in between is black. As I recovered slowly from viral encephalitis, a neck scar should have been the least of my problems. But like the other peculiarities of the summer of 1992 into the winter of the next year, repositioning myself as a patient and not a student amounted to piecing together details and rebuilding a self. There was physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, art therapy, and writing therapy. Group therapy. Visits with doctors and psychologists. Painted flowers and lined notebooks. Diagnoses and prognoses. Turtlenecks. No one said “tracheotomy;” no one said “breathing tube.” No one said it would ever go away.
A plastic surgeon reshaped the gap to a more tolerable slit, like a small zipper etched in vein-dark purple. It’s uneven and looks carelessly sewn. It feels soft and surface-y. Behind it is the laryngeal prominence—the Adam’s apple, the nub where my voice vibrates. Part of my struggle in recovery was learning to reclaim my physical voice, which is the second most recognizable element of the self. The first is visual: who we see in the mirror. Therapy and time aided in reclaiming both, but the voice and the scar which stifled it are difficult to reconcile. Spiraling through a black hole, all one hears is silence.
Unlike the small scar on my knee, which has a vivid origin story linked clearly to the blacktop of the school playground and a long, blood-dripped journey to the nurse’s office, there is no tactile connection to surgery or pain, bleeding or knives. This makes it more like a birthmark, except that it didn’t show up at birth. Talking about it always seems more than overly self-referential; it seems false. Reconstructing the days and months when I was recovering becomes a game of hopscotch picking up pebbles and hopping on one leg, stumbling through nothingness. That may be how all memories are re-claimed, but for a long while I certainly didn’t know how to own this thing that meant deficits and handicaps, embarrassment, explaining the inexplicable. Being on a diet of antiseizure medication and anti-depressants, testing boundaries at home and at school, afraid of relapses as well as social stigmas, failing neurological exams—all of this meant learning to hide in a different way. I became good at ignoring an isolated past and denying a scary present. I am not sick; I am not broken. Unlike the other patients, my brain injury was invisible; there were no crutches or screws holding metal plates in place. But as I continued to deny that I had changed, the scar seemed to stand out more and more. Others may have seen a remarkable recovery, a journey back from a lifethreatening illness. I still saw only the hole, imperfections and reminders.
I could say the necklace fetish began the next fall when I returned to college, but it really goes back to that Polaroid my father took of me at the hospital, which created a sort of tunnel vision for me. Instead of messy hair, droopy eyes, or a double chin, I saw a horrible intrusion, an additional curse that summed up all those pre-adolescent discomforts and awkwardness my body had persistently granted me. Here we go again— one more thing to mark me as ugly and awkward. Bring on the masks.
Make up never worked. I’d pat face powder around it, fiddle with shades of liquid foundation. This resulted in shadows, lines, and the guarantee that I would be more conspicuous. One time at a family gathering, I went to hug my brother, and then had to brush make up off the lapel of his suit. My neck had left a clear imprint. High collars and turtlenecks were decent enough, but I could never get the knack of scarves or find a fitting style. The chokers made perfect sense. My sister bought me a few made of black metal or fake silver. One had miniature beads, another three strands which lay decoratively on my neck. These were fashionable, but didn’t cover the whole scar. Even simple silver chains became caked with dried make up. My only option was to stop thinking about it, to quit these obsessive cover-ups.
There was no moment of clarity; no epiphany of healing. I did what rehabilitation taught me: I went on with my life. I lost weight, began working out, and when the vanity of aging shifted to gray hair and wrinkles, I fixated on it less. I fell in love and married a man who thought it was beautiful. Accepting its visibility became a kind of invisibility. Confidence grew and successes followed. The voice that had been crushed by my inadequate windpipe recovered too. I could hear myself again.
When I think back on it, most of the time spent on cover-ups and self-consciousness is rooted in a world view that I’m not ashamed to hold. There are others in the world whose scar stories are much more heroic. I don’t think my story is heroic because everyone has scars, many which are earned in violence and remembered pain, knives that are not lifesaving in but fought off defensively. Even scars born of adventurousness and folly, from drunken fires and unfenced trampolines, are etchings of disasters that have been survived.
My father wore a scar from the top of his sternum to the bottom of his ribs and a matching one deep in his thigh. A surgeon opened his heart and laced a vein from his leg tying it a quadruple bipass. I never asked him if he was bothered by his scars, though another I know proudly claims hers with low cut shirts and a brave bosom. A friend at work has her zipper down the back of her neck; it closes the skin against her brain stem where a surgeon rearranged her nerves. In all the years since my trachea scar centralized my preoccupations, only one person asked me about it directly.
If I see beyond the rote mechanics of a doctor’s duty and open my eyes past the camera’s lens, I find a long line of people who cared very much if I lived or not. I begin to see past the anonymity of flesh and knife to the faces of my father and my mother, my sister and brothers, friends who sat vigil and prodded me back into a self I could recognize. Eyes whose gaze I scorned now belong to nurses and therapists who taught me to speak, students whom I’ve taught to listen. I see a notebook with childlike scribbling, practice pieces that would morph into poems and find themselves in the spine of a book. I see my husband and I understand finally what he means when he says the scar is strong. If we wear them in life, then each scar represents a gift of life’s daggers: healing, closing the void, a return from breathlessness.
When I put my finger to it, it’s easy to feel beyond the skin, to think beyond scalpels, cartilage, and vocal cords. Like air holes in a wood flute, fashioned to a specifically harmonic note, there is poetry in the necessity of such a cut. Windpipe. Rough artery. Incision. Larynx to lungs. Trachea. Like a whistle, a dolphin’s blowhole, a volcano. Tracheotomy. One third of a haiku.
Amy Nawrocki 