He gently pried my hands away, but he didn’t look at the scars on my stomach. Instead, he took my right hand—a hand calloused from decades of labor, with joints swollen from the onset of arthritis.
— “Why are you crying, Elena?” — His voice was low and warm, but it carried a profound sadness.
— “I… I look terrible. These scars… they’re ugly, aren’t they?” — I sobbed.
Manuel let out a long, heavy sigh. Then, he slowly began to unbutton his own shirt. It was my turn to freeze.
On Manuel’s left chest, directly over his heart, was a long surgical scar running down to his torso. It was the mark of the bypass surgery he had undergone a few years back. Under the dim yellow light, his skin fared no better than mine—age spots, sagging areas, the marks of a man who had weathered over half a century of life.
He took my hand and placed my palm directly over the scar on his chest. — “I didn’t step back because I was repulsed, Elena. I stepped back because I realized that while I wasn’t there, you had to suffer so much pain alone. My scar was to keep me alive, but your scars… they are the badges of a great mother, a resilient woman who sacrificed her youth for her family.”
He leaned in, pressing a gentle kiss to my forehead before moving to my tear-stained eyes. — “We have both been ravaged by time, Elena. We are no longer the boy and girl with perfect bodies. We are two soldiers who survived the storm to find each other at the end of the road. These scars aren’t ugly. They are the pages of a diary, written in blood and tears upon our very skin.”
