by Faune Vita
The scar on your heart is a chimera, a three-headed beast. In the morning it was blown up like a balloon made of leather, and you couldn’t stop touching it, marveling that this was a part of you—delicate, ugly but so beautiful, like snakeskin, heavy until it burst, and the serum seeped out.
You pared the rough skin back until there was only a glistening pearl, which reminded you of the sycamore trees that grew tall in the hollow where you once lived, the way the gray bark peeled away in splotches, revealing pale, white skin underneath. Tea made from this bark was used to purify blood.
You washed it with soap and rubbed petroleum jelly on the tender skin, to keep it safe, to help it heal. But still, the white-hot flame in your mind burned bright, and you held yourself tightly. Just once you had wanted to know what it felt to hurt like that, to hold such power. Could it make you forget, make you whole, make you nothing?
Write from the scar and not the wound, your teacher said. The scar is a shape, a thing you can see. But the wound is the place you were trying to reach, to cauterize with your fire. Now you know—it’s the place you’ll never quite get to, a disappearing act, a tear in the sky. This salvation, too, is only temporary.
And so, you will learn to love the scar, passing your fingers over its thick pink flesh. You will wear it and carry the wound inside, a reminder always of the part that is still burning.
Faune Vita is a writer and artist from the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. Her work explores themes of intergenerational trauma, illness and embodiment, and the natural world, and her writing has been featured in Susurrus, Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things, Mississippi Quarterly, and more. She holds a PhD in English Literature and teaches nonfiction writing at a small college in Western Mass.
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