all your scars

She showed me her scars one late summer evening, as we were lying in bed listening to the crickets. It was too hot to do anything else. They all had a story, from scrapes when she was a kid to things I won't repeat here, things she meant just for me. She had never seemed so naked. She knew everything about those scars and now I did, too.

I started showing her some of mine--the ones I knew about, the ones that had stories. None of them were very good. She noticed one on the side of my knee--a long white line. "What's this one?" she asked. I looked at it for a while then said, honestly, that I didn't know. There are lots of things I don't know.