eschara;

[longerthanwedo]

The creative writing assignment was to "write yourself without yourself", to take a bit of research on a subject and write about yourself through that topic and through a second or third person point of view. Of course I ended up not writing about myself at all, and instead I wrote about Dean.

Eschara
500 words
2nd person POV - Dean is "you" and "he" is Sam

Consider the Latin for a moment.

It’s everywhere, drenched in history and blood, sharp and consuming. It cuts across your skin like knives, the very first knives, the ones that shaped your life and your face and your mind. Roots, crisscrossed and battered with scars.

The word scar comes from the Latin eschara, and it’s fitting. That beautiful word, eschara, intricate and easy only now it’s shortened, brass and broken, edges sharper than ever.

He’s a scar on your skin, tissue formed after a wound, new and stiff and he moves in different directions, away from you and your mixed up ideas, but he’s part of you, he covers the raw and he’s permanent, with his own bones and his own brain.

You’re covered in scars, but he’s the biggest. The rest re-open and retreat, but not him. He goes deeper, reaching into your blood.

A fortuna scar – the Latin again – is one that runs in a different pattern than the non-wounded skin. The scarred tissue is vulnerable to heat and unfamiliar things, but it’s your non-wounded skin that hurts the most. Your root, your fortuna scar, is protective. It’s what stays after the redness fades and the biting pain is dead and gone.

He absorbs your pain and sometimes you wonder if he has a scar of his own to save him.

Your scar grows with you, stretching and shifting with age, expanding. Sometimes you feel as if he’ll completely overwhelm you, that the scar will become eschara once again, reclaiming his origins and yours, blanketing you, smothering you in his inherited Latin name.

The worse the injury, the bigger the scar.

Your skin will never regenerate, never smooth over. There are animals who, when they get hurt, can rebuild without scars, but you’re not one of them. The animal’s skin tears and nothing changes. Your bone breaks and when it knits together it’s smooth and it’s whole and you forget the injury.

Scars stay, they stay and they echo the shape of the original wound. He is your trace and you are his, even though the physicality of it changes like all things do.

Your skin is spotted and ridged all over, short, sharp scars, broken scars, insignificant scars. You can’t remember half of them, the real or the fabricated, those born of metal or those born of guilt. Your scars have scars, and you have scars that are not yours, he has scars that are not yours, but they don’t matter. You can’t feel them.

They aren’t with you when the old fires start, when you move directly into them, with him at your side. Your scar is damage and your scar is invincible. Your scar means you can’t be truly hurt, not while he exists. Forever and unbending.

It’s grounding and the only thing that keeps you here sometimes, keeps you from floating, from regenerating your entire shape, shedding your marked up skin and breaking apart.

Eschara and escape. That knife is sweet and it’s constant and its roots, like the Latin – the darkness – will never fade.

He will never fade.