At least the same guy who explained my attachment to junk, The Counselor For Disaffected You -- I mean Youth --, helped me see how influenced I remained by my past. Unfortunately it was a lesson delivered tongue in cheek, as he ultimately believed I'd made most of my past up just to impress him.

About one thing he was right, my mother wasn't actually dead yet. Telling everyone she was though made my life far less complicated. I don't think anyone at the boarding school, including my friends, teachers, certainly not my counselor, ever found out the truth, which was fine by me. That's the way I liked it.

My arms, however, were another story. It's kinda funny, but despite my current professional occupation, I don't have any tattoos. Just the scars, the biggest ones of course being the ones you know about, this strange seething melt running from the inside of both elbows all the way up to the end of both wrists, where -- I might as well tell you -- a skillet of sizzling corn oil unloaded its lasting wrath on my efforts to keep it from the kitchen floor. "You tried to catch it all," my mother had often said of that afternoon when I was only four. See, not nearly as dramatic as a Japanese Martial Arts Cult run by Koreans in Indiana. I mean Idaho. Just a dropped pan. That's all.

As for the rest of the scars, there are too many to start babbling on about here, jagged half-moon reminders on my shoulders and shins, plenty stippled on my bones, a solemn white one intersecting my eyebrow, another obvious one still evident in my broken, now discolored front tooth, a central incisor to be more precise, and some even deeper than all of the above, telling a tale much longer than anyone has ever heard or probably ever will hear. All of it true, too, though of course scars are much harder to read. Their complex inflections do not resemble the reductive ease of any tattoo, no matter how extensive, colorful or elaborate the design.

Scars are the paler pain of survival, received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.

House of Leaves