My childhood friend S called me unexpectedly early one morning. She never does that so I was prepared for some crisis and anxious as I answered the phone. She sounded forlorn but nothing was seriously amiss. That morning when she was washing her face, she noticed a pale white patch under her left eye that covered a quarter of her face. The discoloration was so mild that no one would notice until it was pointed out to them. S said she fretted about this thing for a good hour before she remembered it was a relic from her infancy. The ups and downs of life had been such that she hardly had the time to look at her face thoughtfully and so this scar had faded into oblivion. But recalling how her face came to be scarred triggered some avalanche of bad memories and she needed to talk to someone who would understand.
S had just learned to crawl back then, Her mother was ironing some clothes and most unaccountably had left the hot iron on the floor and was apparently engrossed in talking to a friend who was presumably in the bedroom where the action was taking place. As the two chatted, S crawled over to the hot iron and stuck her cheek to the plate. The action was swift, she was taken to a doctor immediately after getting first aid at home. The scar on her face became the center of her mother's guilt and existence. She remembers the remnants of that into her early teens. Her mother recounted the event many times over the years but the identity of the friend always remained a blur. He father chose not to discuss the event at all. S says theirs was a loveless marriage but they stuck together from lack of motivation to do anything else.
That particular morning, S wondered if that friend in the bedroom her mother was so engrossed with that she left a hot iron on the floor around a crawling baby might have been the third in her parent's marriage - the cause of their sad co-existence. For some reason the idea that the incident could have been a random act of neglect and not an accident made S feel like the foundation of her life was a lie and the rest could simply fall apart any moment. We talked about that and many other things for over an hour. I believe I left her in a better place after that - in the least enabled her to move on from that train of thought from a past she had no way of knowing or validating to things more in the here and now. After we hung up, I thought how this strange conversation made perfect sense for me and S to have but it would come across something between crazy and entitled had it been someone else. I felt so lucky to have had S a steadfast presence in my life.
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