Some beginnings do not welcome us into life. They welcome us into the scars that will one day teach us how to live.  There is a kind of silence that becomes so familiar it feels like furniture. The empty chair at the table. The single hand at visiting day. The form that asks for a name your heart has learned not to speak. We do not talk about these wounds enough because they are so common they have become invisible. We have built entire languages around avoiding them. "Fatherless." "Abandoned." "Broken home." Each word is a diagnosis that misses the living. Each label is a cage built by people who have never had to live inside the story they are naming. But what if the wound is not the end of the story? What if it is the first sentence written in a language we spend decades learning to read? I have been thinking about scars. The actual, tissue-deep marks that remain when something has been torn and, against expectation, refused to stay torn. The body does...