Scars and Stones in the Fog

 A personal essay by Claire Owens

"A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar.” (Stephen King)

My Scar

“How did you get that scar?” Mckenna pointed at the white line across my wrist. 

“Ah,” I turned the white of my underarm towards the ceiling and peered down the mark. It followed my vein up to the edge of my palm. “I got lost after practice once,” I explained, “And the cross-country coach usually locks up the school once everyone’s come back from their run. He’d already closed down everything when I found my way back. While I was climbing over the gate, the chain-link fencing on the top snagged my arm, I guess.” 

“Oh, that’s sort of cool,” Mckenna remarked. “I can’t even imagine you doing something like sneaking onto school grounds.” She laughed. 

I smiled, thinking of the grueling 5ks and worn-out sneakers and foggy mornings. Every week of high school had led up to the climatic Saturday morning meets filled with youthful runners and that humid fog before sunrise. 

The Fog

Fog is an enigma to me. Thousands of miniscule water droplets suspended in the air create one dense nothingness that coats your vision in a haze of grey. It hinders traffic and blocks blue skies and cancels races. A fog has lived in my mind all my life. Thousands of thoughts and memories so numerous and so small they become one obscure blur in my head. Memories tend to slip in and out of my mind like water. I can never hold on to them. 

In the winter of 2019, my plane flew through the fog above Atlanta. It was Christmas and that meant Georgia was bleeding fall colors. I had forgotten how the trees here overflowed with crimson in the middle of December. I think my parents cried when they saw me walk out of the terminal. I’m pretty sure my brother was recording on Dad’s fossilized camera (and since there is no video to be found, he probably forgot to click the button). I don’t remember carrying my suitcases to the car so Dad and my brothers must have taken them for me. 

The car ride home had felt like a blur with everyone speaking over each other, layers of memories swimming inside a blue van whose’ name and model I haven't bothered to remember for the past decade. Through the mist beyond my window, I remember seeing blood-red leaves fall from deciduous trees within the mist outside.

“How did you get that scar on your wrist?” Max asked, looking down at my arm. His voice was much lower than it had been eighteen months ago. 

Daphne laughed. “I remember that! She burned herself while taking cookies out of the oven. Claire can’t help but burn something when she’s in the kitchen, herself included.” 

“Oh, yeah,” Max said, “I remember, now.”

She lifted up her phone, a picture of a scarlet sunset glowing on the screen, “Look, I found some pictures from our beach trip before Claire left on her mission.” Max grabbed the phone and stared at the photo.

I turned from their illuminated faces and stared down at the scar on my wrist. The fog can’t remember cookies. I wondered when I’d placed this scar in the wrong memory. I wondered where the right memory was.   

Christmas Dinner

My first Christmas Eve back at home, we all squeezed into my Aunt’s dining room. My mind churned in a swirl of monochromatic memories as my mom and her sister uprooted old stories and took out family albums. Aunt Katherine’s family was new to Georgia and she asked my mom about the public schools. Mom leaped into a thorough analysis of every teacher and class from kindergarten through 12th grade. I smiled and ate my turkey and potatoes. 

Of course, the returning heroine, the honorable missionary, was bound to receive her own questions. Uncle Mike wanted to know how well I’d learned Spanish. 

“I can get by,” I answered modestly.

“Did you have trouble with the accent?” A loud, wet noise caught our attention and he digressed from the conversation to say, “James, you need to bring the food to your mouth, not your mouth to the plate.” 

    

James looked at him for a long moment before taking the plate between his hands and lifting it to his face. In a loud slurp, he licked it clean.

   

 “James!”

    

I laughed, relieved to have a distraction. It was hard to ignore the fog in my head when everyone asked me questions like “How many people did you teach?” or “Are you ready for school?” and I wanted to reply that, por supuesto, creemos en Cristo. My siblings laughed at the mashed potatoes on James’ nose while I sifted through a mirage of water droplets, trying to remember what everyone else seemed to grasp so readily. It made me subdued and afraid so I stayed silent, hoping no one would ask me to open my mouth. Hoping no one would know that I didn’t know. 

Not knowing is like keeping a secret. Convenient since you often forget you have one. It made me embarrassed and confused, someone wandering about in broad daylight with mist in her eyes, like a chicken with its head cut-off. 

Aunt Katherine was taking notes on her phone now as my mother listed social studies tutors. “Max and Claire both loved their 6th grade teacher. Oh, but Mr. ____ is a little odd. Claire didn’t like him that much.”

    

Like a gale of wind from across the table, I heard a name that erased the mist. One moment, I was reuniting with my family around a dinner table. The fog was over my eyes. The next moment I was remembering. 

    

I was the middle schooler who had told her mom that Mr. _____ shouldn’t be a teacher.  I had told her that he made my friends uncomfortable with his long lens camera and hot breath on the back of your neck when he leaned over your homework. Truthfully, he’d just made me very uncomfortable. 

There had been instances of wandering eyes, instances that drove me up the wall and out the door. It had been the first time in my life that I’d run away from an adult and been right to do so.  

    

The minute of window-pane memories zipped past me. The thoughts evaporated and the fog returned. Hot breath and camera lenses condensed into raindrops in my head, suspended and motionless and safe. I felt myself exhale slowly, potatoes and turkey forgotten. For once, as my little cousin laughed and my brother catapulted his salad onto the tablecloth, I thought it might not be so bad to forget. 

Prometheus Turkey

    

One of the great enigmas in life is that we truly believe we are invincible until something bad happens to us. Like Bertrand Russell said, “We are all like the turkey who wakes up [Thanksgiving] morning expecting lunch as usual. Things can go wrong at any time.”  But if I’m a turkey, I must be a Prometheus turkey because I wake up the morning after Thanksgiving, having grown back overnight and forgotten all the dark, dark things that happened to me in the kitchen only yesterday. 

    

I know that my life is not perfect. But it hides the past in fog, scars and crimson memories blurring within a haze of forgetfulness. I think something must have happened in middle school, something to make me edge away from human touch and flinch at the sound of a camera shutter. 

It’s also suspicious that I only hold fond memories of my 8th grade dance because, as I look at the pictures in the family album, I am positive that I must have been mortified. I wouldn’t blame anyone for giving me a hard time if I walked into the dance wearing a hot pink, chevron dress. 

I am grateful that I cannot remember the dance or the people that surrounded me during those darker days of my youth when my social skills were questionable, my sense of fashion an absolute crime, and my teachers abnormally creepy. 

Summer Camp  

    

Once, several years after my era of chevron, I worked at a summer camp. That summer was hot and humid and the closest to Hell Georgia’s ever been. The group of boys I looked after was a pattern of striped tees and flip-flops and gap-toothed grins. But the grins never stayed on their faces for long because someone would say something and then someone else would pull their punches and then I would really be in Hell. 

The one day I caught the kids fighting the most, we were at the lake. I turned away for a few minutes and when I looked back at the shoreline, they were sending missiles at each other across the sand. The children were throwing stones, lifting their arms up and swinging them down like some kind of David hurtling violence at Goliath. Except the rocks just hit little chest and little shoulders. And then those little boys just threw stones back. These incredible, young, boyhood bodies hardly reacted to pain as they chased each other across the lake, their reflections stalking after them like a loose-fitting shadow.

    

“Hey,” I shouted, waving my hands to pull their eyes away from their stones and towards my voice. “Hey, what are you doing?” Someone was crying and several campers had red cuts bleeding right down their sun-burned faces. I couldn’t understand why they so desperately wanted to see each other bleed. I couldn’t remember seeing anything as crimson as the bloody rill running down little Jason’s jawline. I think it was then, at that moment, when I decided that I was supposed to be here in this world to catch some of the stones that people cast at each other. 

Stone Catcher

    

Literature gave me a chance to return to old memories I had forgotten. My mind was a constant blank page and no matter how much ink I bled into the lines, nothing soaked in. That meant that every time I pulled out Secret Garden or Hardy Boys and opened the creaking spines, I could read the book for the first time. 

Over and over and over again, I read about people that already knew me and I was thrilled and surprised and shocked and everything a reader should be. I never changed in my reactions and the story didn’t either. My head stayed blank and void, allowing me to remain blissfully ready for another experience of Rebecca and Peter Pan. 

    

Then I read about Walter and Bryan. Unlike Peter Pan or the Hardy Boys, these men were flesh and blood non-fiction, and they actually managed to leave stains on my white parchment self. Black ink on white paper. 

    

I was nearing the end of a mentally exhausting class. My teacher had asked us to read Just Mercy, a best seller on discrimination and incarceration within the American Justice System. 

I felt like Bryan Stevenson was clawing his way up and over my blissfully blank state of mind and dumping cold, inky truth all over me. There was so much adventure and conflict and hurt in the stories he shared about victims of the Criminal Justice System and it hurt me to know that those stories weren’t make-believe. 

As I neared the last chapters of the book, Stevenson shared an experience he had with one wise, old woman. Everyone was throwing hate and discrimination at one another like stones. The police and the judges made assumptions about minorities and so the poor, the under privileged, and the ostracized fought back. But, as she mentioned, there wasn’t enough love to go around. She told him something about being a stone catcher. And, like a stone, that thought lodged itself in my forehead; you’ve got to be a stone catcher not a stone thrower. 

A few weeks before the start of Fall semester, one of my summer camp boys materialized on our doorstep with his sister and a tupperware of banana bread. 

   

 “Thanks for everything,” he said.

   

 “For what?” I’d asked, trying not to stare at the transformer collectables swinging from the zipper of his bag. 

   

“For not telling my parents that I fought with Jason back then,” he replied, looking like the picture of remorse. “We were really happy you didn’t tattle on us.” 

    

“Back when? When did you two fight?” Tyler and Jason had been friends for many years. I couldn’t imagine them being mad at each other. Tyler looked at me and his sister clung to his leg, koala arms squeezing the rough fabric of his jeans. 

    

“When we fought at summer camp… nevermind.” He smiled as my mom came to the door. They talked. His sister ran back down the driveway and he waved to us over his shoulder as he followed after her. 

   

 I could be haunted by that lingering “nevermind” but I’ve come to peace with this unknown past. I forget the good things and the bad things, yet people only remind me of the good I’ve done. Maybe this forgetting is a virtue, not a curse. 

Stones in Fog

I have two allies that have been with me since childhood. Their affection for me led to avarice for each other and the two of them often fought. My coaxing, care-free character wedged itself between their wall of words. Years later, the three of us are still together. They tell everyone I made their friendship. I don’t remember how… but I’m reassured that my past self was trying, in her cringey, pre-teen way, to stop their verbal stone throwing.

    

Unfortunately, my siblings are creatures that resort to physical violence. If my friends threw pebbles, my brothers and sister swung boulders. My mother tells me that the scar running across the tip of my chin is a wound received after I bodily prevented a brawl between my brother and sister in the Cheesecake Factory. I’m grateful that no one (else) was hurt, but I don’t blame them for fighting. Cheesecake is a precious commodity. 

    

Now, it is almost Christmas, again. Present-day Claire has three scars along her right forearm. One is a crisp cut that follows my veins from the wrist down. Another is a faded red tear dropped, elongated across my stretching skin. The last scar hides between the freckles near my joint like the outline connecting two constellations in the sky of my skin. I have no idea how I have these scars. They could be the marks of a stone catcher or something else, but I choose to believe the former. 

I am still wandering through a fog. 

It leaves gaps but sometimes those gaps are the empty branches of naked trees and all the bad memories have fallen to the ground in a waterfall of crimson that I can crunch beneath the soles of my feet. 

Forgetting, it would seem, has made me durable, tough, water-proof. The memories roll right off me and I step forward into the mist, undeterred by the future I cannot see and the memories I can’t remember. 

Image credits:    

“Man on the horizon” by Pikist is licensed under CC BY

“Cars” by Pxhere is licensed under CC0 1.0

“Empty Plates” by Pxhere is licensed under CC0 1.0

“Shore of the Lake” by Claire Owens

“Books” by Pikist is licensed under CC BY

“Stone” by Pxhere is licensed under CC0 1.0