had my bath today and caught a scar on my left arm i hadn’t spotted in years; i guess it sort of blended in, i know it’s there but it’s been a while i actually thought about why, my earliest memories of this scar was tying it with what i think was a red or white handkerchief, i won’t lie, my memory is a bit fuzzy, but i am sure this is a lived experience, because i positioned both my arms on my back and the image came back to me, for a brief moment, or what felt like that actual moment which i am able to reference as this memory, i was on my knees sometime in secondary school, it was a tradition (for me at least) to get punished alongside others because an adult with mental issues cannot process the situation at hand beyond reverting back to an animal, anyways, for some reasons the principal had decided he will be serving a few senseless strokes of cane (a wooden stick used by many of the failures i considered teachers at that point in time), a way to deal with whatever he was going through at that moment, for some reason people like these are trusted with guiding kids to a bright future, a voice in me says because of this scar, you are experiencing this moment, i am not grateful that, i remembered trying to block a stroke on my lower back somehow, with my arms together, my left arm in this case, and that stroke made me bleed home, hence the handkerchief, hence the scar; it fills me with so much joy in this present moment rediscovering this scar, knowing he died in that same miserable job a handful of years later, it was a fair trade.