The scar along my forearm is a country I have left,
but the skin remembers what the mind has filed as theft,
the white ridge catches winter light and every time I see it
the body floods with something older than the word to free it.
I did not plan to carry it. The wound was twenty years ago.
But the scar has its own calendar, its own undertow,
and when the weather shifts or someone grabs my arm too fast
the skin replays the incident like an emergency broadcast.
Skin memory, the body keeps a record of its own,
skin memory, the damage written deep into the bone,
the mind can file it, talk it through, and say it happened then,
the skin does not believe in past tense, skin remembers when.
The burn mark on my shoulder from the radiator pressed
too long against it in the dark has memorized the rest
of what that evening held — the shouting and the shattered cup,
the way the house went quiet in the moment I stood up.
I cover it in summer but the covering is a lie,
the burn mark feels the season change and opens like a sigh
of recognition, every nerve relighting in the place
where heat once held me down and left its permanent embrace.
I healed, they tell me. I moved on. I built the life from scratch.
But healing is a surface word — the dermis does not match
the story that the mind prefers, the narrative of growth.
The skin remembers everything the mind forgot. They are both
correct, but in the dark the body overrules the brain,
and every scar lights up like a switchboard tracking pain,
and I am not in this bed, in this year, in this room.
I am back in every moment that the skin has kept in bloom.