Scars
Published in Strays.
A sign of pain and trauma? Yes, of course. But scars indicate something else, too.
The dream, now a few days dissolved in my mind, felt like a sign of closure. Laying there at three in the morning, running a quick inventory of what’s real or imagined, it didn’t feel like a burden had been lifted or that anything had been resolved — just that it was time to move on.
To now force resolution feels like I’d be fixing a broken ankle a few years after the fact; the reality that it healed incorrectly or formed a terrible scar overlooks the fact that it still, remarkably, healed.
The feeling, it seemed as I drifted back to sleep, was one of reluctant closure.
Nothing I can do will change things. The scar has set. I have no choice but to move on.