• It was her skin that said the most about her. It was reality. Its truth was the exposed scars that lay across her body like a topographic map. Their stories told her. Some were pitted indents where the flesh had never regrown from whatever trauma ripped it away, and some were raised, textured surfaces. Most were old, flat and faded white scars like the clean lines on a wall when a photograph that had been there for years was removed. Some were in odd shapes, like the star on her right shoulder blade, or the circle on the opposite hip. They stretched from head to toe. From her scalp and the tips of her ears to the fine white scar across the bottom of all five toes on her left foot. It was like a roadmap; exposing everywhere she had been, with souvenirs to commemorate special places.

    They weren't always beautiful, but she made no apologies for them. They were what they were, the same as she was. Some of them were like old friends… present for as long as she could remember. Some of them were just bad memories she carried with her, but didn't let weigh her down. Each had their own emotion, a thought to speak, and a tale to tell.

    There was a thin scar that split the small red hairs of her eyebrow. It was one of the first. She had gained it the day she learned to ride a bike, and lost her sister. Her mother and father had been at the hospital. She had been left behind, to young and unsuited for the horrors of the hospital in which her cancer-ridden sister lay. Left at home with a neighbor, she discovered her sister's dust-covered and neglected bike in the back of the garage. Fascinated by the relic of an elder child she had barely met, she had dragged the device free from its cobweb-hidden corner and taken to the streets with it. Stubborn and willful, she found a way to mount the bike--a short fence had helped-- and discovered how to get it moving. Then, wobbly and unsure, she had tumbled down barely a few feet forward. The skin of her eyebrow had split, disgorging blood down her face and raising the horrified shrieks of the neighbor. Another child might have been terrified, and indeed she was, but she was mad as well. Determined that a rusty toy would not have the better of her, she mounted the bike again and again until she didn't fall off anymore. That night her parents came home and told her that the sister she barely knew was gone.

    Another scar curved the back of her left calf from just below the knee to an inch and three quarters above her ankle. It was slightly raised, and shiny and pink like satin. It matched the two fine white lines on the same hand, one across the inside of three fingers below second knuckles, the other across the palm. She had earned them the week after becoming an orphan. Her parents dead, her home and possessions gone, she had learned the harsh reality of the streets when a Junkie, crazed on whatever poison was rotting him slowly, attacked her in the throws of a withdrawal. His knife split open the flesh of her calf and let her blood flow down to the pavement sticky with sick and filth. Wounded and terrified, she had defended herself with a rusted fragment of a tin can that had cut her palm wide open. At the age of sixteen she took a life.

    There was a scar across the bridge of her nose, gained when a burning piece of wood had dropped from a ceiling and landed there. It was shiny and pink as well, but flat as silk. The star on her back was from the same fire. When she had stumbled and fallen, blinded by smoke that choked her lungs and tore at her eyes, and landed upon the white-hot belt buckle left behind by some previous tenant.

    There were more scars, easily dozens, perhaps as many as fifty. Not all were big, or particularly noticeable. Most weren't very pretty, or at all attractive. They all had stories though, and those stories all-together told the larger one of her life.

    Her eyes, however, were gentle and blue like the sky. They were open, welcoming, and knowing. Her voice was soft and filled with laughter and strength, slipping like cool water from full lips that smiled often and spilled kisses like rain. Some nights, when the weather was calm but the night was stormy behind silent walls, she would say to him,

    "Baby, I'm just a worn, torn, big-eyed Rag-doll. I've been chewed up and spit out, shot, trampled, killed and abandoned. I've seen a lot of things, touched hundreds with these hands and walked thousands of miles on just these feet. I've come out on the wrong end of more things than I care to count... but I can love. Maybe that's not a lot to some people, but it's everything I've got... and I love you."

    And just to prove it, she would kiss him gently on the lips and smile slowly, show him the ring on her finger, and all the secrets of the world in her eyes.