Scar tissue

[This post made me remember this story]

She was a very shy child. Painfully so, I think she once said about herself.

You wouldn't imagine it now. These days, she cannot take a taxi without learning about the driver's latest visit to the dentist, cannot walk into a shop without befriending the person behind the counter, the lady in line behind her, the man browsing for a birthday card.

But she used to be the girl at the back of the class who never dared put up her hand. The child who didn't understand numbers. The one who never spoke up.

What she had was art. She spent hours in her room drawing, asked for paints on her birthday. She was helping her mother to raise four younger children, and every spare moment was spent bent over a sheet of paper, spilling out what was inside her.

And in her lessons, she drew under cover of her desk. The seconds and minutes she stole when the teacher's back was turned were collected carefully, and became her masterpiece. Over weeks she added to it, this large drawing she kept hidden in her desk.

She was seen, one day. The teacher told her to bring it to the top of the class.

And she was told to tear it up.


Is this the point at which part of you stops being a child?

Or is this the part of you that is always that child?

I don't think that teacher ever imagined that one, small, now-forgotten thing in a schoolroom forty years ago would be the thing that never healed inside someone. I don't think that teacher ever knew what it was they did that day.

She still shakes when she retells that story.

Maybe none of us realise how easy it is to leave scars.