William's Jigsaw

No: why should you see my scars?
You didn't share in my trials
so why should you look on my shame?

If I was glass I'd let you look –
but then there wouldn't be any scars,
only fragments.


9 November 1988
  
 

So William’s still with the lady doctor and he’s being as awkward and cryptic as ever. When I was in San Francisco—the one and only time—we stopped off at Borders to look for books and CDs. Typical me, I fly to the other side of the world and spend most of my time looking for things I could find in Glasgow. I did find a copy of Ignacio, a soundtrack by Vangelia I’d never heard of which was good, a book of poems by Patti Smith which I thought I’d like more than I did and two books of short stories, one by Thomas Bernhard and another by Sherril Jaffe which I brought purely because of the title: Scars Make Your Body More Interesting and Other Stories. I’ve mentioned it before.

I have two scars, two visible scars: the first I got as a little boy when someone threw a rock at me but it’s hidden under my right eyebrow, the second is on my left wrist and that’s the odd one because I did it in my sleep, dug my nail in and cut my wrist. Very strange. It’s not a big scar but it is a scar. As far as my psyche goes, well…

My favourite quote about scars is by Leonard Cohen from The Favourite Game:

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.