The Smell Of Bleach I have a scar on my hand and another on the back of my head. I got them both when I was 22 working on a construction crew down south. The scar on my hand came from trying to beat back loneliness. And for a time I did. I shattered it one night along with a pane of glass. The scar on my head came from the business end of a shovel swung by a guy whose jaw I broke trying to save a girl. As it turned out the girl saved me….though that took the better part of a year. A scar is where the true gets forced in. That’s never easy. Something is usually broken when it tries. That year what’s true about loneliness and bravery, about the stains we all carry and the hope of absolving them cut their way into me. Some nights I can feel them reach toward each other, trying to meet somewhere in the middle like the true is trying find its way down into the heart of me. My scars are a kind of map. They are full of right turns and wrong places. B
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