scar.
I still remember how you got it.
I remember when the stitches were fresh—three small staples embedded in your eyebrow after you slipped and fell in your backyard.
You came to school the next day with a bandage and a kind of self-consciousness you never had before.
“It makes me look ugly,” you said, fear woven through every word.
I told you that it was barely noticeable. I even pretended I couldn’t find it.
You laughed at that. I remember how soft, how sweet it sounded.
I thought you were beautiful, even with the dried blood still hiding underneath your eyebrow. Especially so.
Years went by, and I found my gaze falling on that eyebrow from time to time. A habit I never corrected.
Sometimes, people would ask what happened because part of your eyebrow never grew back.
“Nothing,” you’d say.
As if it didn’t belong to you anymore.
It confused me.
Why didn’t you want to talk about it?
Was it embarrassment? Insecurity? Something else entirely?
Whatever it was, you shot down any mention of it.
And I never understood why. Maybe because I didn’t know you as well as I thought I did.
Or maybe because I became protective of the one thing I had left of you.
There I sat, years later, with this secret.
Despite the distance that’d grown between us as we got older, I still had this: a part of you I could return to with every glimpse at your face.
We don’t speak anymore. I haven’t seen you in years. I will never get to search for that scar on your face again.
But I still remember how you got it.