[This is capturing a scene in some detail from childhood, earliest memory assignment]

The scars have always been there, across the point of my chin, triggering vague fuzzy memories of pain and the horror of doctors, feelings and shapes moving through the cloudy haze of my early childhood. I know the party line, that I would fall and land with my chin or cheek or something inappropriate. At least one time, blood flowed everywhere. A quick ride to the base hospital, torn away from parents, stitched up. There was no little brother, so I was very late 2 or more likely barely 3. Forever a part of me, without reflection.

Decades later, a friend worked on my jaw, head, and neck – problem areas. “The injury was like THIS,” moving my jaw, generating an intense click. Memories flooded, full color vision, without sound. Lying on the sidewalk, pain sweeping through me. Crying? The sidewalk extended, then turned right a few feet to some concrete steps up, a screen door, the entrance to our house, a little porch, bordering bushes, blue sky with puffy clouds. Once I sat in that porch, with my dad showing me a plastic model of an old-school wheel space station. I can sense the feel of the kitchen, the rough layout. The building was khaki, with some kind of siding, the lapped over asbestos squares. I could see the control joints, the rounded edges of the walk. My dad ran over, and the memory stopped, in his arms, sort of safe.

Another memory returned a day or two later, with continuing movement of my jaw and neck. I was in a building, being carried back somewhere, screaming. Arms holding me down. Holding my head. A green cloth over my eyes, the shield with a cutout for my chin. The needle went in, like a red hot poker moving through me. Trying to scream, strong hands. An industrial repair of my flesh, professionals working on the broken thing, restraining it, keeping it from getting in the way. Nothing existed but that white hot needle, tracing it’s path through me, again and again. Blurry, all of it, fuzzy white-clad figures, ceiling lights, red waves of pain.

The hot fire of steel through flesh is long gone. All that remains is sadness when I touch my chin, and the tears in my heart, my safe childhood ended, from a fall on the walk.