The Scar That Remembers What Never Happened
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
The drowning memory came with a scar she didn't have before—a pale crescent on her left wrist where her mother's fingernails supposedly dug in. She discovered it at seventeen, running her fingers over the raised skin while showering after swim practice, wondering why she'd never noticed it before. The shower water was warm but she shivered anyway, suddenly certain that she had been held underwater somewhere else, in another life, by someone else's mother, and had only now remembered to forget. She stayed in the warm comfort until the hot water was gone, until the shower glass steamed up and she slipped and fell against the tub wall, everything unimaginably cold for reasons she could not name. She had read about trauma-induced amnesia in popular magazines, but only Nancy Drew could understand any of it from experience.
Once in a while, she still half-expected to find herself swimming in murky water, kicking against subterranean currents or drowning in open sea, finding her stinging, pounding palm or wrist, her artery or her temple, gouged open with someone else's nails.
Someone other's mother. Her mother's fingers. Someone else's fingers.
Perhaps it didn't matter. There was no way to prove—
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