Carlos Rojas
26 Scars
You can't fake scars. Well I guess you can, but I won’t. I've got scars. I didn't get them the old fashioned way. People gave them to me indirectly and inadvertently and without much consideration for the tenderness of my skin. It seems like from the very beginning they've been giving me scars. I've got them on the inside and the outside. I've got them stretched across my back. I've got them on my palms and on my belly. I've got them on the bottoms of my feet. I've got more scars than teeth. Don't worry about me though. I'm used to them. They are as much a part of me as my voice or my tears. Some of them sit right behind my eyes. And every time I look out into the world, I see the world through my scars. So many many scars. And I have letters, too. I have a whole bucket of letters. I think I have the alphabet. Maybe in a different language I might not have them all, but in the language that they speak to me in the rooms with the therapist chairs I have all the letters. Once upon a time, I used to twist the letters and spin them on my refrigerator door. I could slide them into words. I could spell. Write sentences. But then one day, they took the letters down. And they gave me 26 scars. Because each letter that was removed was a cut. It was a jagged wound. It was a zigzag hole in my skin. It was the shape of each letter carved into me. Sliced across the whiteness. I can no longer spell with the letters on the door. But I can spell with the letters that are now a pinned into me. I can spell with the scars that are now stuck to me with sutures and wires and the butterfly stitchings that the careless doctors often use to close me up and keep the bleeding to a trickle. I have become a writer as I shift the wounds to form the words that I need to make to say the things that I could never say when I was whole. I am a jack-o'-lantern. I am a war torn building and the bullet holes then infect me get larger and larger with time. I have enemies but I don't know who they are. You know, they say that in the beginning there was a word. And the word was made up of letters. It is the letters that I am now worshiping. What else can I do? What else can I do with these letters of mine? At least the scars are interesting. At least they have something to say. When the monster who made us first opened himself and spoke, were those words just scars on the inside? Did he spit them into the world soaked in the blood of his infiniteness? I don't know. I'm not that important. I am a book you find underneath the leg of a table just to keep it even. I am the poem that someone wrote because his teacher told him he had to. I am the 10,000 cuts that I use to keep me quiet. To keep him quiet. To keep the words and the letters from telling too much of my story. Because that's what they want to do. They want to spread me out in sentences and end my days without a vowel.
בְּרֵאשִׁית
In the beginning I was whole, but now I am a universe. I am a million unspoken words that will be embalmed like my body and placed wrapped in meaninglessness into a coffin in Egypt.
You Are the Wind
She leapt over the short wall and climbed through the hole where a basement window will one day be. She was running from the wind that brushed against her when she thought she was free of him. Foolish. She slid along the wall; it seemed like the wind was kicking in each brick. She swore she would go to bed that night with a topographical road map of remarkable bruises. She looked down. There were none to see. The wind has been careful to hurt her deeper than any eye could see. She felt them. All of them. She didn’t wince. But there were tears. The wind swept them from her face. They ran like cat eyes.
“Bring it on, Buster.” Her mouth couldn’t make the shapes she needed for these words, but her mind felt none of the mishandling. The words were a sturdy font in her head. Serifs deep and strong. She wasn’t going to escape the wind, but he was going to get an earful. Eventually.
He was gone, and a knee-jerk feeling of disappointment amazed her. He was headstrong, but so was she. She got lost somewhere between her grief and nostalgia. When was the first time he tried to hurt her?
It was way back when poison wasn’t even a word she knew. She remembered the plastic motor car. Pink. White racing stripes. Wheels that crackled at “high speeds.” She dashed down the tiny one way street. A single car could kill her, but there were no cars. No tenants in the houses. This was the city where no one lived. But the wind. The wind found her here when she bolted into it. Her lips fluttered and her eyes separated from the holes in her skull. He was trying to kiss her, but she was only five. She wasn’t having any of that. The wind was a man when she was only a girl. She wasn’t scared. Not yet.
Tonight, there was no pink car. Just her feet. The wheels of her feet as she ran like Mercury. Her caduceus was a double braid in her hair. Run, stupid!
The wind was a marathon of a thousand feet. It was her voice. Her blinks. The moon, reflecting light so quickly and cruelly. Everything disputed her claim to Jupiter spawn. Still, she swore her moth was a nymph. A mother who did a kind of death only weeks after she was born. Her father brought a hurricane to every nightly visit.
Was that it? Was that the first of the wind’s advances. Propositions. Invasion. Her father’s hands were fast and rough from his hard work, but he could also dance with her on the toes of his shoes. A wedding. Whose wedding? A brown haired cousin. She wondered if her girlhood was shaken by the wind. Did the wind wrap his legs around every girl? Or just her?
I’m a man, he said. I was just a tiny handful. A girl who tumbled into the world. She fell into the hole her mother made by pulling her hands away. I was just a baby girl. Was that the wind? Was that giant fall enough to blow her tiny wisps of hair out the kitchen door of her bald head? That door always slammed so hard. He tightened the screws. The door was a spanking, too. Her father, the wind. Wasn’t that it? Wasn’t that the hidden identity of Jupiter? Was it visible from the back yard? Could the wind blow a planet out of its orbit? King of the Roman gods. Swiftly. Swiftly.
Now her feet were wheels. A Barbie chariot. Roman Colosseum. Cheering. Her mother. Johnny-come-lately. What’s the use after 12 years? The wind hid his angry hands inside of her. Tormented but warm. She was torn in half by the galling gales. She couldn’t look her mother in the eye. The wind did that. He blew from the origin into the copy. She couldn’t open her eyes to see the invisible scars that ran like racing stripes down her mother’s long wrists. Wrists that reached out desperately to catch her before they were turned to tricks Gambols. Gibes. Trickster Mercury.
She stole her memories. She refused to remember her mother as anything but trouble. And now she was in trouble. The wind. As fast as she ran, he raped her. What the hell was she thinking? She was no match for the legacy of her mother or the hard hands (and other parts) of her father. The wind blew the memories into her without consent. What kind of wretched kink was this? She was a balloon too close to the ground, filled with air. Her body was a blur as she tumbled down the same one-way street.
There was nothing ordinary about this dash, but she knew that it was common across her sex. The wind had a way of empowering the men of the world. Jesus saw it. He washed the feet with water. He turned the abuse to loaves and fishes. Jesus was a water sign. He was the whole zodiac, and He didn’t give a damn about stolen gods. He was at her kitchen door, wrapping his knuckles bloody, but her father found the grass stains on her new white shoes.
“You’re not a boy!” She knew. He taught her.
On the top of that hill. Calvary. The wind was just that. She sang into the metal fan. Her song wasn’t pretty, but still the wind charged her. She made the clop-clop of horses’s hooves. There was no wind that weekend when Jesus Christ had his moment. But she was blown off of her cross. She couldn’t even sin right. He took that and tossed it into the air of the oneway street. Who “he?”
Which he was it? The wind said only two words. “You know.”
“I know?” The wind made her head nod.
“Yes. You do. You are the wind, my love.”
She took a deep breath of herself, and summoned all her muscles to race faster than the tiny pink car or the blood in her highway of living. Fuck off, Mercury.
“I am Hermes, and no one’s hands will catch me.” She mastered the wind and blew through the urn of her father. Ashes everywhere in the wind that now baked her escape to freedom and clean living and unmolested thoughts that caught when her mother couldn’t.