My best side

I can’t tell how noticeable it is. Old friends know what happened. New friends are polite enough not to ask. At least not for a while. At some point it usually comes up, a quite question, almost embarrassed, or a casual reference to it that claws desperately at nonchalance. No one wants to offend and sometimes it is hard to tell what offends. 

And I so I can’t tell how prominent my scar is really. For me it is both major and minor. It has transformed my left profile and at the same time, leaves me looking no different – not really – than how I’ve always looked. 

“It” is a scar running from beneath my hair a short way down my temple, past my eyebrow. There are  dark brown connecting lines and finer diagonal ones running down my cheek that look like what they are…rug, or rather, road burn. Both evidence of where my face slid through pavement and glass so many years ago. 

The scar has changed my profile. 

It has faded over time, or rather, diminished in obviousness even as the dark lines remain. Maybe I just notice it less. When it first happened the scar was three-dimensional – raised roughly above the plane of my skin. My head was partially shaved. But hair grows and scar's anger calms. Eventually it  just became part of the contour of my face.

But I still see it.

Sometimes.

There is a picture of me from the day before the accident. I am perched on the side of a flatbed truck, wind running roughly through my wild hair. We’d been at the beach for days and I hadn’t bothered to comb my mane – what would be the point. my eyes are closed and my head is cocked to the side. I can remember enjoying the feel of the sun on my face and the wind on my skin. It was delicious.

Even all these years later though, that picture hurts me, haunts me. A moment frozen in time. The last moment before my face changed forever. The angle of that picture is mostly my left profile. It is a simple example of the pre-accident me.

As bad as the accident was, we all walked away. And as bloody as my head injury, it wasn’t grossly disfiguring. After removing all of the blood and glass, after silk sutures threaded my skin and time sealed the wound closed, I mostly look like myself. 

It is only rarely that I am struck by the question of a new friend who asks innocently, “what happened there?”.

And I tell the story, complete with all of the humor and horror 15 years of telling this story, and a world of perspective have taught me. 

And my profile preference? Depends wholly on my mood. Some days I like to remember a mark-less canvas and sometimes I appreciate the character surviving provided.