I have small scars which cluster the backs of my hands and feet like stars. Across cultures, we map stars to stories: an impossible hero fighting an even more impossible monster, or the birth of the world. This cluster of stars tells of a baby in intensive care, too small to be fed with anything but the point of a needle, a thin, tearing path stretching across my ankle as I grew. 

A story which transcends time and tradition is the clear, porcelain body. An idea universal but foreign, a body without mark or flexing bit of pain. Instagram and Tiktok reward clear, glassy skin; as if the collagen we’re advertised to stir into coffee isn’t the same as what knits a wound closed. Scars are living damage to our aesthetic economy, to blot out or cloud over, fading only with expense or time. 

Yet that scar is living. Not a compositional slip but evidence of repair, cells building upon cells with torn information. It may not be the complexion you had. You aren’t either. But it is your dynamic skin, more tender and raw but undeniably your own. 

My legs are covered in memory: a piece of coral from surfing with friends, a surgery that allowed me to run again, scraped knees from happily distracted trips up the stairs, or the pinpricks that gave me life. Not all stories are triumphs, but they’re yours all the same. The starless sky offers little inspiration. The unmarked body tells no obvious story.  

We long for a body that hasn’t undergone anything, like we could pass through life untouched. Never struggling against nor showing signs of age or experience. No one wants scars, no one wants the pain that comes with it, or the aftercare of the moment’s healing. But I don’t resent the skin that grew to cover old hurts, or new tissue as I’ve gotten taller. I am that baby deemed too small to live, and yet -if you trace my skin- you can see that I have.