Scars

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

HERE she is again by the river, running her fingers through the water, digging her foot on the stones below. She can see clearly her face, worn out by the sun, the wind, the earth, and waves of experience. There were lines on her forehead, made fine by the ripples formed by leaves and flowers dropping from a tree.

She flipped her legs in the water, noticing how long and thin they were. There were marks on her left leg, from wounds, burn and sores that did not heal completely forming small scars in various shapes, and where some fibrous connective tissue had formed into a map of a country she visited once before.

“This”, she thought, “I got from scaling Mt. Apo.” She remembers exactly how her limbs gave up and had to be carried by a horse on her way down, and that the horse almost fell into a ravine, unable to bear the weight on its back. The horse suddenly stopped, throwing her off among twigs, with one sharp twig slicing through the flesh on her left leg.

An older scar is etched below her knee, smoothed over by time, hardly visible, but did not escape the probing fingers of the massage therapist whose services she regularly hired from Cavite, to realign what feels like a displaced nerve inside her knees. She does not remember how that pain came about, but she remembers that the scar was the result of tripping over a hole covered by thick grass, as she rushed to catch the airplane to bring her home, to catch a dinner date.

There were other scars with significant histories, and she remembers each story by heart, each detail she can recount, as if they happened only yesterday.

The scars she tried to forget, and wished did not remember, were the ones that were not visible, but were always there. Not in one particular place, but in so many places at the same time, occupying all the pores of her skin, suspending her breath, clouding her eyes.

 

The memory of the fall

A delicate white lily waving
from the ravine
one misstep, she falls

red aratiles begging to be picked,

aching to roll in her tongue
climbing, she falls again

returning late, from a date
climbs a high gate
she falls again, and again

and again

caressing the scars
on her left foot
a muted testament of the life
and the tragedy

of the falls

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