She eats me alive, like I haven’t been eaten alive before. She bites into the core of my existence, scraping at whatever’s left. I find myself wondering if I’ve ever truly healed, or if the wounds were just waiting to be scraped clean again. Like scabs that only hide the surface of pain, when the cut is a lot deeper.

I thought I’ve dealt with this long ago. Years ago. I supposed to have moved on, to have embraced it all, accept it all, like the way you accept a scar on your knee. It’s just the way it is. The fall that almost paralyzed you for life instead made you stronger, and you wear it like a battle cry, proud and showing off its off-colored shadow against the rest of your skin. You boldly declare what you went through, for all who would listen, who would dare look. It resembles a broken heart. Its shape so lively, pulsating with every one of your move. Every time you move your legs, taking a step forward, you see the scar vibrate with the movement. Reminding you it’s still there. You be proud of it, or you die because of it.

I thought I was done with this scar. I thought i’ve accepted it, and sometimes, some days, I even have learned to mask it. Use make-up the color of skin, invisible and neutral, to ward it away, to pretend it never happened. Though like traces of skin, it tugs at my heart anyway.

She is the scar in my body. The scar in my mind. The scar in my life. Almost paralyzed, but never quite dead, she challenges me to be better, she challenges me to get up every time she strikes me to the ground. I don’t understand her, yet I am the one who most understands her. Who better than her eldest daughter to understand her? The first to share her body. Once, we were joined by the umbilical cord. For 9 months, I read her thoughts, wrote my name on her soul, became who she was. For 9 months, she formed me, lifeless from a tadpole, into a beating heart, until finally out delivered a baby that became who I am today. We used to be one, and I don’t understand her. I am reminded constantly that the evolution of abuse grows with time. It never stops, it doesn’t end. It just functions to the different beat of a drum.

It rips through me. I am a mother now, and it rips through me, forming new seams I didn’t realize existed. I am a mother now, and it rips through me, burying itself into my core in a new way, making itself known in a new fashion. It rips through me, and suddenly, I find that the scar has changed color on me. Pulsating, becoming bigger with time. And suddenly, as if to remind me that I need to pay more attention, the scar has moved.

And some days, I panic because I don’t know where it’s gone. I know it’s somewhere on my body. It never leaves. I would be silly, in denial, to think that it’s ever left me completely, even when masked with skin-colored make-up. But it’s not supposed to MOVE. It’s not supposed to just up and MOVE, relocate to a different, secret spot on my body. It’s not supposed to make me question how much I know myself. Every inch of myself. It’s not supposed to make me look again. It’s not supposed to make me search for it.

Haven’t I spent enough years trying to pinch it down, hold it down, live with it, embrace it, accept it? Why did it have to evolutionize? Why did it have to change? Haven’t I spent enough time on this? Haven’t I?