In The Wake
I've been thinking about stains, rips, and scars... and how significant it can be that we continue moving through life with the faith that it's worth it to really be here.
Some nights I eat frozen blueberries until the tips of my fingers are stained, or open a window too wide and wait til the chill creeps in — goose-bumped skin and tingling toes are a small price to pay to hear the early wakening birds or the reverberating rain.
More and more, I have found myself looking for the impressions of life around me. The what and the how of the way this life leaves marks upon me, the good, the bad, the hard, the true. It is a fascinating study for the idle brain, and perhaps the most significant question is what truly remains in the wake of just living.
It is the nano-structured crystals in a blueberry’s outer coating that reflect both blue and ultraviolet light, leaving indigo stains on faces, mouths, and hands. Goosebumps are a result of teeny, tiny muscles in the hair follicles pulling themselves upright in response to the chill. But these are temporary responses to an environment, largely of my choosing. What of muscle memory or skin-etched scars from moments now long lost but never quite forgotten?
My brother has pencil graphite embedded in his hand from somewhere within the realm of high school or art college. It shines through the waxy skin and lifeline creases on his calloused, skillful hand. When my father was little he fell on a glass bottle which cut a crescent-shaped wound just above the crease of his forearm. It’s stark against his olive skin, all the more imposing on a 71-year-old given how large it must’ve appeared on his 4-year-old limb. At the base of the middle knuckle on my left hand, there’s a gouge running half an inch. It’s faded from raw to red, to pink, to silver, directly next to the tendon that flexes as I type, the skin is taut and guarded. I remember gingerly pulling my dough-covered fingers from between the beaters of a hand mixer, bruises forming, hand throbbing. It was caught just long enough to successfully carve uncomfortably close to the bone, and I occasionally still feel a twinge from it.
Whether we’re left with tangible marks, embedded foreign bodies, or newfound landscapes of the skin, so much of what we come into contact with very much leaves an imprint — yet these are only the ones that we can see. How do we categorize, or even recognize, the bone-deep,1heartrending moments that don’t leave physical bodily marks, but still have the power to catch us by the throat?
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” — C.S. Lewis
In the wake of death, your brain continues to operate under the impression that the someone you lost is still very much here, despite the reality. This makes moments of absence all the harder to rationalize — reaching for the phone to tell them something before you remember that you can’t, seeing a stranger with long, silvery hair, so you pause in the crowd, even though you know it can’t be her.
These moments are markers, that we move through and yet very much carry — I still use that same hand mixer because there are still beautiful things to bake, but now I know to keep my hands outside the bowl. When I’m hit by a wall of grief I didn’t expect and find myself back-stepping — I allow the moment to swell around me, and slowly the world refocuses.
Slowly again I can notice small things like the beauty of blueberries, staining small hands, and jubilant faces. Stains, rips, and scars are not a deterrent from living, but a reminder of the ability to heal at all. Heartaches can be hopeful, a muscle memory of something so big that we have to navigate the world very differently without it. That we had it at all, and know what it feels like. That somehow we continue to live in the wake. Marks and all.
A woman wounded in the Oklahoma City bombing once told me, "Scars tell stories." Very much so. Nice piece, Mila.
"How do we categorize, or even recognize, the bone-deep,¹heartrending moments that don’t leave physical bodily marks, but still have the power to catch us by the throat?" This caught me by the throat! I have so often asked myself this question--so many versions of it--and never seen it so poetically articulated by another. Thank you.