Vessel
by Lily Wissler
My scars burn when I step beneath the shower head. There’s two of them, mirror images on either side of my torso. The places I joke the wings were cut from or inserted. Today is a day, this feeling is a day, that means that the wings were wrest from my skin after all.
This old buzz in the bulky tissue comes on with no warning every once in a while, entirely random. The scars themselves are not new. They are antique surgical incisions from an operation I try not to explain because the technical language takes away from the pain I went through in order to receive the twin scars. People tend to get caught up in the details of it when I tell them. Either the injury, or the surgery. I don’t like the either/or, nor do I like to talk about it at all. It being both, all, none.
When the results of the either burn in times like this, it reminds me that I have them. These two blights on my skin are in spots I can’t see easily, making it so that when I do catch a glimpse it feels obscene, inappropriate. I glance away quickly.
My mother always says I should love every part of myself. That this body got me to where I am today. It feels demeaning, then, to admit that I am in the shower right now. Exploring mundanity, a victim of being unclean. Everything I have worked so hard for has brought me here: beneath the shower head.
Really, this is all to say I don’t think about the scars much. That these moments of awareness strangle me in a way that is hard to put into words. It is a vicious push-back my body gives me. I know my mother’s words should help me take these moments as signs that I am moving on—that those old pain-days are done enough I have to be reminded. I don’t live in the cobwebs anymore. Or, more accurately, I have stepped into another one to distract myself from the old one, the scar one.
I don’t touch the scars. I do the necessary things, of course, like rubbing sunscreen onto them when the time calls. Though, this is always done with a rushed hand, so I don’t dwell on the ridges. I have to tell people not to touch them, the space between them. It doesn’t come up a lot, but when it does, I speak with a terse, low tone that unwittingly begs them to ask me to repeat myself which always makes me want to say, Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I hope they didn’t hear any part of my cobwebby whisperings. The scars get a mind of their own when they’re touched without warning, though, really, touched at all.
They make me mean, make me snap like a dog. Hands off!
Please, I’ll amend.
I find I much prefer to focus on the water stream when nights like this happen. Ignoring the slight, echoing scream from the tight bunches of pink skin as I lean for my shampoo. Ignoring how it feels when their sensitivity scratches against the towel I wrap around myself. Ignoring having to bend with my knees rather than my spine for my pajamas, lest the doubled scars throw me back into that corner of my mind to do more dusting. My body is a vessel, one that got me here, like my mother says

About the Author
Lily Wissler is an emerging queer writer from Dayton, Ohio. She is currently an undergraduate English - Creative Writing major at Ohio University where she is also the head fiction editor for Sphere Literary Magazine.
