Scars

I want to know who I am. The real me. I am obsessed with finding out.

This story is partially about a man who partly killed me and would have continued to do so.

I dyed my hair red today. Well, not really. It is a wig. My thinking cap. And I’ve got it on. How I look changes who I am. How I think I look changes who I think I am.

What I thought I wanted was not in actuality what I actually wanted.

The scar on my chin is the result of his fist. As I start to tell the story I can see that it is about the surface of things. Who I am is different with the scar. The chin scar is different than the very deliberate scar in my nostril in which I sport a tiny shiny gemstone.

The year I went to university we met. He did not go to the university but I met him in my home town. How strange that he came over to talk to me at the corner table.

He never wanted to know me. He never wanted to know me but he wanted to own me. I let him.

The more I became what he acted like he wanted me to be, the more he despised me. He loathed a me he never knew nor cared to know.

Every woman I know wears concealer. To prevent disclosure or recognition of.

He began to call me daily. He inserted himself into my life and then he made himself my earth.

I am alien.

I am just as much me with my hair and my scars as I was before but I am different. The scars he left in me grew tissue that is tougher. The issue is not the scar so much as the healing.

He drove me everywhere in his unpainted jeep. He was old enough to have known better. He tried so hard to be better than me. Like in a story he took me to the beach. He took me to the lake. He took me to the movies. He took me to hell.

He often told me I was ugly. I believed his promises without questioning the definition of beauty. He saw through me. He never looked at me.

It was constructive criticism he explained.

Years later he told me he had been an asshole but he never said he was sorry.

I do not know what I thought. He made it known what he thought. His vitriolic lips and the cruel fist.

Lipstick comes in femme and goddess. The tube tells me who I am which today is lovely. They do not make shades called confused or anonymous.

He told me he was better than me but not out loud.

I am writing this story on scraps of paper that I paste together to form a piece of my life which I will then rip into bits.

I always wanted to be someone else. Little did I know that I was indeed someone else or that I could be whoever I wanted to be. If I act as if I am someone else then I am.

I thought I had to be the me that he told me to be.

Psychological health is measured by the correspondence between who you think you are and who you think others think you are.

One of his favorite pastimes was to be real nice to me for a time. Until I would start to believe his lies and his mask would start to appear sincere. I wanted to believe is what I am saying. Then he would take me somewhere I could not escape. The not nice version was also a pretense. That is who he was.

He did it all in the name of love yet he did not like me much. The me he did not know.

I knew that feeling from before him so it was nothing new. Who I was and who I am. Who did he think he was.

The lies he told me I already knew were true.

One time, long after the scar had become invisible from habituation, a girl I worked with stopped me in the hall. I had never spoken to her before. She exclaimed that I should marry so-and-so with whom we worked. Then she told me that so-and-so was looking for the Reese Witherspoon type and my looks did not measure up. At the time I wondered what it said about me. Now I wonder what it said about her. And how did she know my precise insecurity.

A year later I had almost recovered from the girl and I told so-and-so what she had said to me. He and I laughed about it.

Foundation is a basis upon which something else stands. Foundation is what is used to hide the lines and marks on a face. It does not stick to the scar tissue which has no pores. The basis is the mask. Do you see the irony.

Three classes from finishing university and what had I learned. I wish I could say that enough was enough but it probably was not. He would have continued to kill me. One day he came after me and police ensued and that was the end. He did not want a permanent record of what he was.

Life does not always deliver closure. Or happy endings. I am closer to me. I am not who he thought.

The scar on my face will be there until my end.