“The Time Around Scars:A girl whom I've not spoken toor shared coffee with for several yearswrites of an old scar.On her wrist it sleeps, smooth and white,the size of a leech.I gave it to herbrandishing a new Italian penknife.Look, I said turning,and blood spat onto her shirt.My wife has scars like spread raindropson knees and ankles,she talks of broken greenhouse panesand yet, apart from imagining red feet,(a nymph out of Chagall)I bring little to that scene.We remember the time around scars,they freeze irrelevant emotionsand divide us from present friends.I remember this girl's face,the widening rise of surprise.And would shemoving with lover or husbandconceal or flaunt it,or keep it at her wrista mysterious watch.And this scar I then rememberis a medallion of no emotion.I would meet you nowand I would wish this scarto have been given withall the lovethat never occurred between us. ”

“On the girl's brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”

“I ask you right here to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must see all scars as beauty... because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this story teller is alive. The next think you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.”

“There are things I need to ask her. Not what happened, back then in the time I lost, because now I know that. I need to ask her why. If she remembers. Perhaps she’s forgotten the bad things, what she said to me, what she did. Or she does remember them, but in a minor way, as if remembering a game, or a single prank, a single trivial secret, of the kind girls tell and then forget. She will have her own version. I am not the centre of her story, because she herself is that. But I could give her something you can never have, except from another person: what you look like from outside. A reflection. This is part of herself I could give back to her. We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key.”

“Do you remember? When the fights seemed to go on and on, and always ended with us in bed, tearing at each other like maybe that could change everything. In a couple of months you'd be seeing somebody else and I would too; she was no darker than you but she washed her panties in the shower and had hair like a sea of little punos and the first time you saw us, you turned around and boarded a bus I knew you didn't have to take. When my girl said, Who was that? I said, Just some girl.”

“She wanted Kristen to do all the horrible things she said she would do to her and to have her physical pain from Kristen’s hate replace her mental pain from her father’s love. Pain that comes from the outside was much easier to endure. The wounds heal, the scars go away, and it’s over. She could move on. She would live on and forget her pain. The wounds caused by her father, that festered inside Simone’s heart, mind, and blood would never heal. She would never be able to just move on and forget the scars.”