The Helpful Scars

Sometimes it just happens. I don't know why but it happens. I get hit with a bout of 'BrainBlankitis'. One second I have the idea and half the post written in my head and the next second I am groping in the dark recesses of my brain to figure out what topic I was thinking about. Not sure if this is a regular, normal, human affliction or old age though I personally think it must be old age. Anyway, it happened again today. I had this idea and it was time to switch on the machinery upstairs in the hope that a half-way decent, funny blog post will churn itself out. But as I sat staring at the computer screen showing an all white page, I couldn't, for the life of me, remember what the big idea was.

There are a lot of techniques I have read about, aimed at helping people in exactly this kind of situation. I tried both of them but with no success. My memory was in serious trouble and the blank screen remained just as white as before. By this time my elbows were on the table, my head was in my hands and it was starting to fill with crazy ideas like upgrading my RAM and getting a bigger hard disk. Thankfully I wasn't so far gone yet to actually act on those ideas!

At this juncture, my fingers ran over a small bump on the side of my head. That small bump was what still remains of a head injury from over a decade back. Even as I was feeling the familiar contours of the bump with one hand, my other hand started homing in on a similar scar on the other side of my head. And found it. This one was the result of a meeting between my head and the wall in my school which got a little too intimate for my comfort. And running my hands over these two, old scars, I got thinking about all the other scars and memories spread across my length and breadth.

I had decided that my face was too unremarkable and took the help of the tea table to split the tip of my right eyebrow into two strands. That was a little after I was a baby and a little before I could call myself a toddler. After that, I have done or tried my best to do a few other alterations to my mug. I found that my chin was jutting out a little too much and took the help of the floor to push it back in. I tried to compress my huge head by keeping my head between the door and the doorway frame. Apart from all these in-house aids that I had used over time, the road has been my best and most often used aid. I have attempted to change the appearance and alignment of both my legs and both my hands using the road, on more than one occasion. Unfortunately I haven't been successful in doing that. A fracture in my leg, a shoulder getting dislocated and sundry other scratches, bruises and cuts did give me the illusion that I was getting somewhere in my endeavor only to realize that they had all flattered to deceive.

Now, given the number of times I attempted to make some physical changes to myself, I am not surprised that I have such a list of scars to reminisce about. But the best part is that this reminiscence solved my problem of not having anything to write about. Whether they helped with altering my looks or not, the scars were at least helpful now.