Part One: Epiphany
The meeting was fine, but the important part is the bike part.
Ah, I was so happy yesterday, flying down the Burke-Gilman trail on the way to school. The very end of the street I live on is the beginning of the trail, so all I have to do is coast down about fifty blocks and I’m there. I never knew how close the trail goes to the water, and that it goes right under the freeway. It even passes the “Wall of Death,” a big sculpture that was put up ten years ago. I read it has to do with those motorcyclists that ride inside of cages in a big circle…but that sounds more like a Ball of Death.
The way back was trickier. I was tired from riding down, and Eighth Avenue only goes up on the way back. Hooray for the bus! I was always afraid of those bike racks on the front of the bus, like I would not be able to figure them out and the bus driver would have to climb down and grumble at me, but it was really fine. You put your bike into a slot for the wheels and put a hook over the front, and that is that. I did hit myself in the face with my handlebars, though, because my face always gets in the way. It is always poking out or looking at something.
Something else happened on the way back yesterday: I got really hot. I was wearing a tee shirt and shorts and I was cranking along on the trail, and thought, “what if I just roll my sleeves up, to my shoulders?” What if? I hadn’t done that in ten years.
I hide my arms most of the time because I am pretty scarred from all the self-mutilation that went on in high school. I was slashing myself up pretty regularly when I was sixteen or so. If I was out at a party then I was burning myself with cigarettes, because I was too punk to be alive, even. So I hid my arms for a long time, because regular people thought I crashed through a plate-glass window or something and would say so.
Lately when I talk to people about it, and they see my arms, they say they can hardly tell what happened. I am a sucky healer, so it took them a long time to fade. I kind of don’t believe those people, like they are just being nice. I usually see the scars with big neon-red outlines, just like Lady MacBeth.
I went along yesterday, being all anonymous on my bike and I glanced down at my arms occasionally. They looked sad and white, and a little jiggly from too much Internetting lately. But not really scarred. It’s nice to get older, and see things more how they really are.
But I’m not going to run out and buy some toob tops or anything.
Part Two: Ass Pain and Nostalgia
I was thinking about when I was a little kid and I used to get my bike out as soon as the snow turned into slush and didn’t come back. I would ride all around in my winter coat and see what had changed since I was confined to my own neighborhood all winter. You could find a raccoon carcass in a melting pile of snow, or some snowdrops poking up.
My butt was always sore for the first few days, and then it wasn’t anymore. I guess my question for today is: what happens to your butt that makes it not sore anymore? I guess you get Internal Ass Calluses.
Holy shit! I think I just hit on a name for Mr. Husband’s band! (They have all ready rejected my previous extremely awesome suggestions: “The Atonal Fuckheads” and “Bitchiro.”)
i’m really sad about the toob top coment.
:-(
er, comment.
Yeah, it’s sort of odd how we think our scars are just shouting out for the whole world to see. I have a scar, much faded now, across the bridge of my nose from when I was hit by a car while running and shattered the windshield with my head/face. I was eighteen. And a college friend, someone who did not know me at the time of my accident, asked me about it about a year after it happened. He was one of these people that asks very frank questions, but you don’t mind answering. ‘What happened to your nose?” he said. We were standing in a private study room in the library of my college. I started in on my familiar story, the list of injuries, how I actually felt worse for the man who hit me than for myself. My friend stared at my face as I talked, shifting his weight back and forth. “Jesus,” he finally said. And my lip, which was badly cut in the accident, changed, too. I couldn’t play my flute the same way anymore because my embouchure had changed. One side of my lip now drooped and I did not have much muscle control anymore, so I had to hold my flute differently and blow into it differently. After eight years of playing an instrument, it is hard to change something as fundamental as how you hold it.
I guess what I mean to say, and I’m sorry to sort of go on here, is that I love how you put it — that it’s nice to see things more how they really are. I used to think people were being nice, too, until I realized that no one can really see that thin red tattoo on the bridge of my nose (and if they could I don’t think they would care), and no one who is close to me now knows what my smile used to look like. The ones that love me like my smile now.
Ugh. I watched Extreme Makeovers last night and felt both fascinated and sad. So I have been thinking a lot about my appearance and how much it matters to me — what I can change, what I can’t.
Thanks for a thoughtful entry, SJ.
Yes. Honest to jeebus, most folks are so wrapped up in their own deals that they just don’t see things like that with other people. Or, if they do peep anyone’s scars, they don’t pay much attention. Just look at how we look at other people: even the most attentive of us, unless we are deliberately looking for flaws, just glance at people. Even when we study them closely, we don’t (we can’t!) see scars and bumps and things how they were a long time ago. We only see the healed places. And we probably think to ourselves, “childhood accident” or “dog bite” or something like that. :) It took me a looooooooooong time to figure this out. I used to be terribly self-conscious about a few things like that. But all you have to do is check yourself and how YOU look at others, and you’ll pretty much have an idea of how others look at you.
Now then. I do believe “Internal Ass Calluses” is the best dang band name I’ve heard in a while. Cheers! :D
Thanks for telling me that! I ride a bike and then I am so traumatized with the pain I can’t get on one again for months. Glad to know there is hope in internal ass calluses.
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