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When drunken macho tell turns into proud show, I have a scar that runs for more than a foot from just below my ribs to below my hips. I can laugh it off, tell the story, win the beer, wear the bathing suit. It has been almost 15 years – it wavers between something I don’t see and something that is writ large on my psyche: an exclamation point on a body I love; a punctuation mark after survival.

It was only when they told me they had to put a metal rod in my leg that I cried. I begged the intern to make the scars as small as possible, to insert the fewest screws and stitch the smallest stitches. Summers of hard jobs and funny accidents have left me with corresponding scars all over – commas on my knuckles, ellipses on my clavicle, a purple semicolon on the bridge of my nose… but my legs? They were run on sentences. The last place, on the very things that let me travel from scar to scar in the first place.

One set of scars? That is one thing. One story, one beer, one triumph. Two pairs are the trump to vanity. They require two stories, too much wit and too much self deprecation to fit nicely onto a 5’2″ body paragraph. One brings the other into sharp focus; my frame unable to bury the lede anymore. They are badly placed and awkward, unedited and glaring grammatical errors.

The new scars are small. Inches over my knee, seven purple asterisks around my ankle and upper calf. They have faded and blurred already in the two months that I’ve avoided writing anything at all – anything more than a grocery list or a short email. One by one they are settling into their story line, and so, it seems, am I.

My body has taken a beating with the editor’s pen. But I’m still writing.

I bled the minutes out of my mexican cellphone across four airports – PVR, LAX, JFK, YHZ. Frantic, nicotine and shitty bathroom soap slick fingers stuttering out SMS SOS’s. “Just keep getting on planes,” she wrote, “Text me from the next stop.” Then the minutes were gone and the battery dead, and I was home.

“Maybe you just need to stay in one place for a little while… just stop…” she counselled as I relayed plans for more travel. If I kept moving, perhaps I could circle back on the poor life choices and trump them with new success.

One day and one hour later, I woke up in a hip to ankle cast.

So I’m staying in one place for a little while. Starting again. At the end.

(thanks to my dad, for reminding me in his own way that the end is just another beginning, and my mom, for telling me to keep writing.x)

(ps – how did I do this? It’s in the comments.)