My Scar Stories (a few of them, anyway)

I won't tell them all, because that would be too long of a post and probably very depressing as well and I'm just not up for revisiting that at the moment. I will instead tell of some of my scar stories that in hindsight are odd, if not entertaining.

Battle with a Truck Door (I lost)

My first scar story comes from when I was fairly little, maybe 5 years old? Even though I have very few childhood memories of much of anything, I have such vivid memories from this day. It would have been in the mid 1970's and we lived in a small town in Iowa. We were coming home from a grocery shopping trip that just felt endless. When we finally arrived home, my dad grabbed me out of the truck and laughingly threw me over his shoulder like he did for fun.

Unfortunately, the edge of the truck door was too close and my face hit the corner of the steel door. The cut was right beside my eye, just a hair to the side and I would have likely lost my eye. My mom grabbed a roll of paper towels that we had just bought at the store and was pressing it against my face. That is all I remember of this day, but I still have a scar from it to this day. A scar that used to be right beside my eye, but over the years it has fallen with gravity.

Stick a Fork in Me, I'm Done

My next story comes from a similar time, although I think I was a bit older, I was still a child. My cousin and I were playing a game in my house where we would run across the living room, then slide on our knees across the new slick linoleum in the kitchen. We raced to see who could go faster.

Run, slide and bang! into the cabinets in the kitchen, over and over, running faster and faster, trying to outpace each other and claim the bragging rights of 'winner' by being the first one to the cabinets.

Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my knee and cried out. I tried to stand up, but the piercing pain in my knee was excruciating and keeping me from straightening my leg. I was fine until I looked down and saw a FORK sticking out of my knee. It had stuck just below my kneecap and it really freaked me out! There had apparently been a fork stuck under the cabinets where we couldn't see it.

I still have the little scar from that!

Stabbed by a Pencil

When I was in 3rd grade, I was in a school where I had quite the arch enemy in my class. We were always trying to one up each other, outdo each other on assignments, playground races, stupid nicknames, etc. One day in school he was sitting behind me and stabbed me with his pencil so hard that a piece of the graphite from the pencil stuck in my leg.
That piece of graphite was literally there for decades before it finally worked its way out.

I got him back by putting a tack on his chair, not realizing that he'd sit down on his shin instead of his butt... the tack got stuck in the front of his leg and I actually felt really bad. I still didn't admit that I was the one that had done it, and since he was such a bully to everyone in class, the teacher didn't know which person had gotten back at him.

Have Mercy On Me

I was in 8th grade and weirdly strong "for a girl"... I beat one of the boys at arm wrestling and then all the boys wanted to prove that they could beat me. Only one boy ever got close and that was a tie. I felt pretty bad ass in some ways, but it got annoying that the boys always wanted to prove that they were stronger than me after I felt like it was settled and was ready to move on with things. Plus, it's pretty hard to get any boys' interest when you're stronger than them when you're that age!

Soon after, the game went from arm wrestling to playing a game called "Mercy" where you would link hands facing each other, and then try to bend, twist or otherwise get the other person to give up first and cry "mercy".

As it turns out, I was good at that game as well. I had one boy who was SO intent on beating me that he followed me around and antagonized me at every turn, trying to get me to play Mercy. So finally one day I did.

The teacher hadn't come into class yet and we locked hands. You would have sworn that we were going to break each others' hands. Our fingernails were digging into each others' skin, our fingers clamped so tightly together that the ends of our fingers were white. He twisted this way and I twisted that way. I don't think either of us actually officially 'won' but I always felt like I did, because when the teacher walked in an interrupted our 'game', the kid I was playing had to ask to be excused because his hands were all bloody from my fingernails... mine were too and I STILL have visible scars from it... but I wasn't willing to admit it to anyone and so I just sat at my desk and pressed on my hands so that no one would see.

As I'm writing these, I keep remembering one more scar story (or two) with each one I write!

I'm afraid this could go on forever! Like the time I got a gash right on my eyebrow and the guy who sewed me up reeked of alcohol and had hands that were shaking SO badly that it rattled the paper they put around the cut to keep things sanitary. I spent the whole time hoping he didn't stab my eye out!

Internal Scars

Then there are the other scars, as @hopehuggs wrote in the original Scar Stories post that I can also relate to. The internal scars that sometimes take most of a lifetime to heal from or even realize that they're there and having an effect on the decisions and choices you make in life.

Also the self harm scars from cutting... to in some way, I suppose, ease the very real pain caused by all of those aforementioned internal scars. That is something for another post entirely, because I have a lot to say on them, but I'm just not in a good place to go revisiting that type of scars today.

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Other Writing of mine that you might be interested in:

Getting Older, Wiser and Crankier

Trip of a Lifetime: Short Story

Reading of one of my freewrite short stories