Scar Tissue

Yes, the song.  No, not actually, but that's the first (well, maybe second) thing that came to mind after the phrase did.  But anyhow.  That is entirely irrelevant to anything and everything.  So what is relevant?  What even matters anymore?  Does anything?  I've always been one to doubt that.  I digress.

Scar tissue.  It is thicker than the surrounding tissue.  The fibers line up in one direction and the skin covers the wound.  And yet, thicker though it may be, scar tissue is weaker than the rest of the body.  It is easier to damage it, to cut into it, to get deeper into the body and cause greater and greater pain.  So Nietzsche was very much wrong when it came to pain.  "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."  That's nonsense.  It leaves scars, it weakens you.

Life does that.  It hacks away at you until there is nothing left of your original self, until you have lost all of what you were and replaced it with scar tissue.  Then you become weak and fragile.  Then you're left like me.  I don't know that there is any of me left.  Sometimes it feels like all that's left is this cavernous body stuffed full of scar tissue.  All of the meshing that characterizes health, the tissues that were once the symbols of youth turning into the marks of damage and despair.

Is there anything left but scars?  Maybe.  Maybe deep down within me there is still something that hasn't yet been torn to shreds and reformed as an organized mass of tissue.  Maybe there's still something that could learn to grow and function and fix what is broken.  Scars don't exactly work that way, physical ones, at least. But maybe the ones I bear do.  Maybe all of the emotional entanglements characteristic of humanity that have been broken in me and regrown as scars, in one simple, beautifully painful direction, can be regrown, can be caused to tangle afresh and maintain a certain solidity that I haven't had in a bit.

But in any case, I feel better now.  The scars are there.  Maybe they will heal, maybe they won't.  That remains to be seen.  All I know for certain is that if there is any way for the scar tissue to be replaced by health, I am in the one situation that could get me there.

And last but not least, by request:
*smile*