Scratching - the Scar Skin
What do you do when you suffer monumental loss?
When the tragedies swell and burst, seal and burst again, until your body is a map of old wars—scars shining pink, still warm with the memory of poured blood.
You cry. You break. You get up again. You suffer. You laugh. You try—again.
You work the day shift. You work the night shift. You don’t sleep. You sleep too much. You eat. You don’t. It doesn’t matter. You keep scratching for life, hoping like hell the light returns.
Because sometimes loss isn’t a single wound. It’s an accumulation—an inheritance of small devastations that layer themselves beneath the skin until you can’t tell one from another.
It’s the scabs that itch long after the healing.
It’s the reach for what’s already gone, and the quiet humiliation of realizing your hands are still empty.
Grief, I’ve learned, is not just the breaking.
It’s the reassembly—the stubborn, clumsy act of putting yourself back together when you no longer remember the shape you used to be. It’s learning to live with the scar and calling it skin.
So what do you do when you lose?
You do what humans have always done.
You cry. You break. You get up again.
You work and rest and ache and begin.
You keep scratching—because somewhere beneath the ruin, life, like skin, returns.
