The first scar came in Dalian. The bed stood too high for a six-year-old. I woke to blood cracking in my eyelashes like thin ice. My mother carried me through hospital doors that sighed when they opened. They used seven stitches. The needle smelled of matches struck underwater.
The second scar split my nose clean. A chrome rack in a mall caught me watching my mother’s back. Twenty stitches. She bought gel in a blue tube. “Women like stories,” she said, but her eyes stayed on the floor. I learned to tilt my face toward light.
The third scar doesn’t show. We waited five years. The machines talked when she stopped. I held her wrist until the pulse became a watch left in rain. They say pain leaves. They’re wrong. It finds you in soap smells, in elevator music, in the way strangers say “mother” too loud.
They say scars make you stronger. They say you forget the pain. But pain isn’t in the scar—it’s in the moment before. The fall. The metal edge. The words you can’t take back.
Morning comes. I rub the ridge on my nose. Stitches dissolve. Skin knits. You keep breathing. The good doctors don’t tell you—scars aren’t where it ended. They’re where you learned to live inside the wound.
All stories are true if you bleed enough.