There is a memory that has followed me longer than most people have known my name.
Every once in a while, the memory revisits me. This morning, the memory hung around a bit longer. Let me tell you about it. I was nine years old; the scene was my neighbor’s yard in the 90’s on a beautiful spring day. We were taking turns swinging a golf club and knocking the ball around. I didn’t realize we were competing in any sense. I was just having fun when suddenly the boy became angry because I hit the golf ball farther than he did. He lifted the real golf club, not the plastic toy kind, and struck me across the right side of my face.
The force bloomed beneath my skin, and over the following days my cheek became an ever-changing constellation of crimson, indigo, violet, emerald, and gold.
The following weeks, I found myself standing before the mirror, every morning watching this bruise.
It wasn’t to mourn what had happened nor to even measure the damage.
I stood there in that mirror to witness the colors. To witness the becoming.
A nine-year-old looked at pooled blood beneath the skin and saw stars.
I remember believing the bruise looked like a galaxy. I remember tracing its edges with my eyes as though the universe had somehow found a home beneath my skin. The memory of me saying, “It is art,” always roll through my mind. I thought it was the most mesmerizing thing.
One would think a 9 year old would feel sad or even embarrassed about this big ol’ bruise that covered my entire cheek. While other children may have seen an injury, I saw something vast. Something alive. Something changing. Even now, decades later, I cannot explain why that little girl chose wonder over horror.
Perhaps she didn’t choose it at all. Perhaps wonder had always been her native language… my native language.
That memory became a thread woven quietly through the rest of my life.
My thoughts went deeper this morning as that memory stayed present. I thought about all the times I’ve experienced trauma to the right side of my face. I began to question whether this was coincidence or something more?!
When I was around 11, I suppose, a ceramic unicorn statue that my Aunt had sitting on the headboard cubby space of her waterbed fell in the middle of the night and cut me on my forehead… yes, the right side.
Hot tea burned my face when I was around 16, by the hands of an angry man.
Hands struck the right side of my head in a battle for my life with a man when I was 19
A glass ashtray found my forehead, thrown with anger when I was 21.
A cigarette was pressed into my right cheek when I was around 28.
Life seemed to keep returning to the same sacred geography of my body, as though my face carried a map I could not yet read. Then there is the birthmark.
Long before anyone else’s hands left their imprint upon me, I entered this world already marked. A deep crimson stain resting across my forehead, leaning toward the right, as if my skin had arrived carrying a story before I had words to tell it.
For years I wondered if that meant something.
Was I marked by fate?
Marked by sorrow?
Marked by the universe?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps not.
I have learned that not every mystery asks to be solved. Some simply ask to be witnessed.
With all of these memories flooding into my mind, I closed my eyes and returned to that little girl standing before the mirror as I myself stood in front the mirror in my bathroom.
I asked her gently,
“What are you looking at?”
I expected her to answer,
“The bruise.”
Instead… she said,
“The stars.”
So I opened my own eyes and looked into the mirror once more.
The light caught them. For just a moment, tiny reflections shimmered across my irises like distant constellations.
The stars.
The light.
The same language.
The same child.
Still here.
Something inside me broke open.
I have spent so much of my life believing I was searching for beauty in brokenness, but perhaps I was never searching for beauty at all. Perhaps I was searching for the light that refuses to abandon what has been broken.
There is a profound difference. One ask suffering to justify itself. The other quietly declares that suffering never had the authority to extinguish wonder.
For most of my life, I have carried a question that echoes beneath every poem I have written, every card I have pulled, every scar I have learned to wear without shame.
Who am I beneath everything that has happened to me?
Not my trauma.
Not my grief.
Not my titles.
Not even my healing.
Who am I when every story falls silent?
This morning, the answer did not arrive as philosophy.
It arrived as a child… my inner child. The answer flowed, as I asked it in a way to open the door to her, and she said…
She was innocent.
She saw the world through eyes that had not yet forgotten awe.
She painted cotton-candy-colored skies because somewhere inside her, softness still felt more truthful than fear.
She looked at bruises and found galaxies.
She watched wounds heal as though they were seasons changing across the earth.
She welcomed each scar, not because pain is beautiful, but because she refused to surrender her own beauty to pain.
And suddenly I understood something that changed me.
My scars have never been asking me to become beautiful.
They have been asking whether I remembered that I already was.
I was always worthy of love before any scar, during every scar, and after every scar.
Those words settled into me like rain falling onto thirsty soil.
Because worthiness has never been something earned through surviving. This is so important to understand. Your worthiness has never been earned through surviving.
It has never depended on untouched skin.
It has never waited for perfect healing.
It existed before the first wound.
It remained through every wound.
It will remain long after every visible mark has faded.
Perhaps that is what the little girl knew all along.
Perhaps that is why I stood before the mirror each morning, not searching for proof that I had been harmed, but unconsciously searching for proof that life was still creating beauty.
That healing was not the disappearance of color.
Healing was the changing of it.
So if you have been marked by life… by loss, betrayal, violence, abandonment, or grief… I do not hope that you find meaning inside your wounds.
I hope you discover something infinitely gentler.
I hope one day you stand before your own mirror.
I hope you ask the child within you,
“What are you looking at?”
And when the room grows quiet enough to hear the answer…
May you discover that beneath every scar, every story, every name you have ever been given…
the light has been looking back at you all along.
With Absolute Love, Kazerai Quinn aka Mother of Mourning
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