Battle Scars

Nonfiction. Cuts and bruises.

I try to do the professional chef, finger safety, knuckle curling thing for the thicker fresh produce—your carrots, your broccolinis—but spring onion is a different beast. It is the root vegetable equivalent of one of those inflatable tube guys at a car dealership. Any given bunch will be a goofy mix of long firm strands, floppy stragglers, gnarled stems, and basically I don’t know how to pin the sucker down in a cuttable formation without exposing the tips of my fingers to a sharp blade. 

I mistook the white flesh of my thumb for a spring onion stem recently. The noise I made was so involuntary and alarming that Maddie heard it over Law and Order in the other room—dun dun—and was in the kitchen before the cut had even started bleeding. My fingernail prevented a full blown dethumbification, and now has a very thin quarter-length serration in it, which grows glacially and eerily out of alignment with the rest of the scar. I look at it all the time.

I am very nearly 26. This is older than I’ve ever been. I’m looking forward to the annual wisdom boost my birthday will bring, since it’d be nice to escape semi-regular mini-pseudo-ironic 25-year-old quarter life crises about the decay of my once perfect physical body. For example, after saying, ‘I know that place like the back of my hand,’ to someone at work, I made an exaggerated show of looking at the back of my hands, and became genuinely shocked, then appalled, then filled with existential dread at the number of scratches, blemishes, and sinister looking freckles that I didn’t know were there. This kind of thing is not good for morale. 

By living a full life, and answering calls to adventure (including, but not limited to, thinly slicing root vegetables), we accumulate all kinds of battle scars. A scar is the body’s own, quiet, subconscious way of welding fresh skin over an old story, an old mistake. People talk about wanting to ‘leave a mark’ on the world, but how often do we stare at our own hands and think about the many marks that the world has left on us? And well, not to make my blog all about me or anything, but here is the story of three scars I think about a lot. 

Kaputen Fuss

It was a bright, hot summer in Berlin and the third cheapest, first most enjoyable method for touring around the city was the famously dangerous Electric Scooter. They were new and all the rage in 2019, and no alarming hospitalisation data had been published yet. I had no idea. And though they do go pretty fast because of the high powered motor attached to the wheels, I wanted to go faster, to be more free, to consume even more of Berlin’s tourist attractions. One night, I hung my foot off the edge and kicked the ground as hard as I could, like kids do on analogue scooters. Weeee. Kick. Weeeee. Kick. Weeeeeee. 

Icarus is probably getting sick of these kinds of comparisons, but I really think that I e-scootered too close to the sun. I did one damn kick too many. I smashed my foot against the sharp edge of the standing platform so hard that it felt like I’d cleanly removed it from my body. But no. Still attached.

Faced with the sight of a big hole in my foot, I did what any smart and mature 22 year old boy would do on holiday in a foreign country: I put an extra sock on and went to sleep. Admittedly with difficulty. In a wicked twist of fate—picture Icarus rolling in his shallow wingless grave—walking became so unbearable that I had to e-scooter my way to seek medical attention. A German hospital is called a Krankenhaus, and when separated these two words translate literally as “suffer” and “house.” That’s just bad marketing. I was sent away with a discharge letter in Deutsch medicalese and three dark blue stitches for my sins. 

Even years later, this healed skin on my ankle is the weirdest, silkiest, most wonderfully smooth bit of flesh I’ve ever seen. It’s like a portal to another dimension, a jagged, smooth patch of purple as big as the tip of my thumb. Bizarre.

Chin-sney, On Ice!

I was 10 and making my debut ice skating appearance with a group of friends. The first thing the instructor said to us was, ‘Don’t play tip.’ This happened before even introducing himself or telling us how to lace up the skates. ‘I see it all the time, people always get hurt, don’t play tip, tag, chaseys, whatever you want to call it,’ he said. He then ran through basic zig zag skating basics, explained rink etiquette, and reminded us, again, ‘Whatever you do, don’t play tip.’

I’d say less than fifteen seconds after the instructor left us, we were playing tip. Duh. I can’t remember if I was It, or if I was just particularly eager to get away, but I immediately abandoned my training and tried to run instead of skate. In my head I heard that classic pantomime cartoon timpani sound effect—the same one that plays whenever a Wile E Coyote plan backfires, and he sprints on thin air for a few seconds before whistling down into a deep ravine. After five, ten seconds of desperate, probably very visually funny slippery scrambling, I came crashing down and smacked my chin into the ice.

Every time I go ice skating I am struck by the same thought: Who the hell thought that this was a good idea? Like, ‘Hey guys, why don’t we duct tape extremely sharp knives onto the bottom of our shoes and book it across that frozen lake? Hello?’ With all the complexity of roller blading on one of planet Earth’s least forgiving terrains, a good outcome for an amateur is that when you fall over, because you will fall over, you at least land on your ass. That’s where the padding is.

Aged 10, I remember being embarrassed about the stack but relieved that I hadn’t seriously injured myself, hurrying to my feet to start skating again. When the other kids started to frown, and then cry, at the sight of me, I remember thinking jeez, I should try and find some new friends—what a way to treat a guy that’s just eaten shit! My face was so numbed by the ice that all I felt was a vague itch around my chin. If you have to hurt yourself, do it in a cold place. Then I saw the drops of blood on the ice. My turn to cry. Two stitches for my sins. 

The Vortex of Doom

I’ve written the full, surreal story of this one before, but a quick summary for new readers: On a nice spring day a few years ago, I was catching a whistling foam missile children’s toy called a ‘Vortex’ when, through no perceivable fault of my own, it exploded the middle bone of my pinky finger. This was not immediately obvious. Nobody, myself included, believed I could have done anything worse to the finger than a nasty jar, even as it became increasingly puffy and purple and rigid. The next day at the Fracture Clinic, the X-Ray showed my bone was split—like a chink in a porcelain plate, because of a Nerf Best Seller. Ages 3 and Up. I am way, way up.

I got two pins in surgery, and had to have a comically large elbow-length cast for eleven days. I had to shower with a plastic bag on my hand for over a month. I learned to type, wipe, and tie my shoes left-handed, and I told somewhere in excess of fifteen medical professionals what had happened to me. Very rarely did I get the sense that they believed me. Or cared.

The scar runs most of the length of my pinky finger, curved and white and angry. Like a very small shark bite. This is the injury that gives me the most grief, since the finger seizes up in cold weather, feels weird and wobbly when I swim, and will never quite bend properly probably ever again.

I look at the shark bite every single day. My palms, my swirling thumb pads, the gaps betwixt my fingers are covered in tiny white scratches from distant avocado mishaps, from shockingly sharp tins of catfood. A scar is the body cooking up brand new flesh in a shape decided by the cut of a knife from long long ago, by the hilt of a scooter in a place far far away. Isn’t that, like, weird?

So many of my problems, and every single existential crisis that I had before the age of 25, seemed completely abstract. Conceptual. Who am I? Why am I? What am I doing with my life? I often mistakenly think that I am my brain, that me and my experience of the world is entirely created by thoughts and feelings inside my head. As I get older, and my metabolism slows down, and my neck gets sore if I use a bad pillow, and my pinky creaks every day in the winter, I realise that, really, I am my body. I am just a thing. A physical, breakable, pierceable machine that can’t ice skate for shit.