While I was living in Ghana after college there was a line in a book that really spoke to me (An Imperfect Offering) that said “No scars, no stories, no life.” My body has its fair share of scars, the majority from a dog attack at a young age that left me with 32 stitches spread out along my left leg, arm, and back. But one of those scars came from that year in Ghana during an October trip to Togo and Benin with my friend Mette. While getting off a motorcycle taxi, the driver’s balance slipped and the exhaust pipe pressed against the inside of my right calf, the pain searing through me like the slice of a knife. Our tour guide put toothpaste on the burn, trying to ease the pain until we got back home to Ghana. I cried on the sidewalk as he smoothed the blue paste across my leg. I was worried it would leave a scar, and I did not want to be marked. I did not want to have to always account for this story or have a story developed for me in the face of obvious markings. So I remained hopeful that a temporary salve could permanently heal a deep wound.
When I got back to my home in Ghana, my boss George, who I was living with (he and his family) at the time, caught me fussing over my wound. I was trying to find a quick way to stop the cycle of puffy skin and pain and ugliness. I had found some ointment for cuts and bruises and burns in my emergency kit and was trying to lather it on while trying to figure out which bandage to put over it. George smiled at me and told me that we had an aloe plant growing in the backyard. He told me to take a short walk to the back and find the plant, then break off one of the leaves, cut it open, and smooth the fresh gel from the plant over my burn. Only then should I gently wrap the wound. I wanted to know how long it would take for everything to heal and if I would have a scar. He laughed and told me to just take my walk to the aloe plant each day and let time and my body do the rest of the work.
That’s not what I wanted to hear, but I diligently put the aloe on my wound each day and gently wrapped it, and eventually I forgot to count the days. I stopped trying to hide that I was hurt from others, and instead focused on the process of healing. Time was only marked by the change in the look to my leg. I had to trust that I could heal, and I had to let go of the desire to choose quick, temporary fixes. In the words of Mary Oliver, I had to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves.
In a singular moment in Togo I feared that I had been permanently and irreversibly scarred. And in many ways I am. But not in the same ways that I once thought. The scars have faded, but I know that they are still there. I cannot escape the words of the story that they tell that add to the spaces of my life. I continue to be the sum of every moment that has marked me. “No scars, no stories, no life.”Just like my time in Ghana with the aloe plant, I purposefully walk the paths toward my healing, making my own salves that I know will let me naturally heal the pain and fade the scars into beautiful lines of living.
Odelia Younge 