My tongue keeps finding the hole. It’s an instinct now, the way your fingers trace the edge of a page you’re not ready to turn. The stitches are small but stubborn, a little knot of string at the back of my mouth.

Just last week, that space was home to a molar I’d carried around for sixty years — a subterranean king with tangled roots and a gold crown, reigning over the back corner of my jaw. Now it sits in a dish in my desk drawer, inert and exiled, while the inside of my cheek learns what it means to be incomplete.

Just last night, I had a nightmare about being toothless, impotent, done.

It’s tender still. There’s the faint metallic tang that comes with fresh stitches, the occasional pull when I chew. It feels strange to have something missing that was once so solid, so part of me. Right now, it’s just a hidden wound. Eventually, it will be a scar.

I have a collection of them.

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The first came when I was twenty, a lumpy red “4” just above my left eyebrow. I’d been in the library for a month, hammering away at my thesis, when a friend convinced me to join him in New York for Halloween weekend. A party, he said. A break.

I barely knew the other two people in the car, a Portugese man, a Latvian woman. We were making good time down I-95 when an elderly man driving the opposite way suddenly decided to change directions. He swerved through a divider, hit us, and we piled into the cement barrier.

The car went still. I remember the radio still playing — Antonio Jobim, a soft bossa nova that made the air feel disjointed and slow. I touched my forehead and my hand came back red.

The ER doctor stitched the flaps together into the wonky souvenir I still wear. The swelling went down, the stitches came down, but the mark remained. A reminder of a night when I left the safety of my own little world only to collide with someone else’s.

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My second set of scars is harder to see, but I know where they are: small white slashes on both my hands, across my palm, my wrist, the back of my hand. They’re from the day my son was born.

Jack arrived in the early morning after a long night in the delivery room. Patti slept; I went home for a shower and to call family. I was exhausted, bent over in the tub to wash my left foot when I slipped. A glass bottle of mouthwash tumbled from the top of the toilet, smashed in the tub, and I went down onto the shards, both hands outstretched to break my fall.

I walked back into the hospital again, hours after leaving, not to the maternity ward but to the ER, a hand towel wrapped around my bleeding hands. My sister tracked me down there, bemused and worried in equal measure. Those lines on my hands remind me that even the best days come mixed — joy and pain stitched together so tightly you can’t pull them apart.
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The third set circles my navel — small, neat cuts from a surgical robot. Seven years ago, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and the operation that removed it left these red puckers, evenly spaced, like buttons on a coat. The biggest one is where my tumor emerged without killing me.

The procedure was precise, even elegant in its way, but on waking up, my torso felt like a jacket that had been altered — seams let out here, taken in there. I ran my hand over the bandages and knew I’d never be the same again.

But the cancer was gone, thank God and Dr. Tewari. These were the marks of survival, of letting strangers cut me open so they could save me.

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And now there’s the newest one — inside my mouth, where no one can see it. It’s still in the raw stage, still unfamiliar, still the focus of my wandering tongue. Like every fresh wound, it’s hard to imagine it becoming anything other than what it is right now: tender, inconvenient, a bit alien.

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When you’re first sewn up and patched together, you can’t imagine your body without the disfigurement. You think you’ll be stapled together forever, like Frankenstein’s monster or Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas — a patchwork of glaring seams, held together with visible thread.

But stitches dissolve. Scars pale. They stop feeling like fissures and start feeling like skin.

Each of mine began as a kind of catastrophe — a crash, a fall, a diagnosis, a shock whenever I bit down hard. Each felt, in its moment, outsized and defining.

But time works a quiet magic: the pain retreats, the swelling fades, the drama becomes dinner party conversation.

Now they’re not catastrophes. They’re bookmarks. Chapter titles. Some I share easily — “this one’s from when I was in college” — others I keep for myself. They’re proof of what I’ve been through, not barriers to who I can be next.

One day soon, my tongue will flit over the back of my mouth and feel only smoothness. The tooth will still be gone, but the gap will belong to me in the way all my scars do: not as a flaw, but as a milestone on the map of where I’ve been.

Your pal,

Danny
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