Maps of Hidden Scars

Some roads aren’t on paper.

They run along skin,

raised and silvered,

etched by survival,

charted without consent.

There’s a scar on my knee

from hopscotch and laughter,

a slip on warm concrete

in a childhood that still echoes.

One curls behind my leg

from the day I fell out of a tree,

age five and fearless,

chasing the sky with dirty feet.

Faint lines mark the surgeon’s work

hip bones opened,

an appendix removed,

a finger sliced and stitched

by sterile hands.

Then there are the tiny, jagged ones

on each fingertip,

gifts from beaks and talons

as I cradled panicked wings

in trembling hands.

My thumb bears a crescent moon

from a stubborn jar,

a domestic sting

that somehow left a mark.

This one curves where a bottle struck.

That one, a blade drawn

like a boundary line

between then and after.

Railroad lines across my forearms,

carved when pain became too loud

to hold inside.

Raised ridges on my thigh,

deep and deliberate,

a language of suffering

that once felt like the only tongue I knew.

Some are barely visible now,

but I remember the pain

of carving into flesh,

how silence bled out

and left something that stayed.

Now they live beneath tattoos,

inked-over stories

I chose to wear.

Another way to scar,

but one that leaves pictures

instead of reminders of the pain.

Still, if you trace them,

you’ll feel the notches,

a topography of ache

the artwork can’t erase.

There are trails too soft to see,

bruises that never broke surface

but still rewrote my posture,

left me flinching at shadows.

A faultline in the chest

where trust gave way,

you can’t see the crack,

but I still feel the shift when I breathe.

Not every scar is wreckage.

Some mark the places

I stumbled but didn’t stop.

I dragged myself forward,

skin torn, spirit frayed,

but still moving.

You won’t find me on any atlas.

But if you read my body,

you’ll know where I’ve been.