alive with the faint hum of cellular commerce, the coursing blood just beneath, a phantom touch of air. I was in that landscape that knew no edges; it was elemental.

A shift. A gathering storm, mounting pressure in the atmosphere, and an ethereal quality of imminence prevailed. Liquefying, like a far-off radiant sun focalizing its malevolence, it began to bloom against my edges, a blush that deepened too quickly to red, then to hyperthermal color.

A low crackle, perhaps, or the vibrating thrum of metal attained its ruin—a visceral scream ran through the placid terrain I was in. The air recoiled, tightening—possibly a suspensive anxiety, turning thick as the blood soon started to boil.

A shattering impact, not a blow, but an imminent crash, an incandescent now that obliterated what was before, replacing it with three ashy buttons.

White-hot metal, a brand not of ownership but of annihilation, met the yielding flesh. It's a sensation of the callousness of heat, an invasion, a devouring entity consuming existence at its root. It felt as if the sun's core compressed to a single point, toasting the unsuspecting world I was in.

Even now, the memory of that sound rips through the air like a gaseous miasma of carbonized skin – a violent, explosive sizzle, a sharp hiss as the very moisture of life vaporized instantly. Beneath that sudden ignition, a deeper vibration resonated – only then my host body's scream, a distant tremor felt through the convulsing ground of tissue. And the smell of my first breath, my birth scent. Acrid, sharp, a grotesque sweetness of protein chains breaking, hair curling into black C's and vanishing – the unmistakable perfume of burning flesh. It filled the void where simple air had been.

What the bare eyes saw then is forever imprinted on my being: a cataclysm, a blinding radiance of white light pulsed from the point of contact, charring the epidermis and dermis instantaneously, turning vibrant pink to angry red, then to a dead, cracked black like volcanic ash. An angry corona of heat spread outwards, a shockwave of destruction rippling through the layers. Pain is a force that is both creative and destructive.

It was the tearing apart of bonds, the cellular structure surrendering, melting, bubbling under the onslaught. It felt like a physical weight, a crushing architecture being erected and demolished simultaneously. It was a feeling too vast, even for the nerves; it was the simultaneity of decay and destruction.

Out of that crucible, I was born. The cautery iron, the instrument of my becoming, forced a violent metamorphosis. Blood vessels beneath me spasmed, their contents heating rapidly, coagulating into useless clots – a desperate, failed attempt to stem a tide already turned to steam and ash. The layers of skin, the epidermis and dermis, collapsed into ruin, their cells undergoing eosinophilic coagulative necrosis, a process akin to cremation, leaving them as fossils. Cutaneous nerves, messengers of my former home, were silenced and burned away, leaving a profound numbness. This destruction wasn't merely an end; it was my beginning. The first flicker of my consciousness, this raw "I," was forged in that sensory inferno, defined solely by the violence that made me. If they could be called that, my first thoughts were fragments of that agony: Searing. Hiss. Stench. Gone. A gasp of being, born from obliteration. The very intensity that created me also annihilated the possibility of normal sensation, setting the stage for the silence, the numbness, and the dissociation that would follow.

The shatter did not recede into coolness, but rather a vast, echoing deafness followed the piercing shriek of becoming. The sheer volume of heat, sound, smell, and pain triggered a shrinking back, like overloaded circuits, and my nascent awareness collapsed inward, a freeze response locking down the chaos. The surrounding tissues throbbed with residual heat, and the host trembled with agonizing shock. Still, within my territorial integrity, a strange calm descended upon me, like plunging into icy water after emerging from a furnace, a numbness swelling from the exhaustion of sensation itself. My inference, born in extremity, became immediately unreliable: a world viewed through a fractured lens.

Dissociation draped itself over me like a shroud. Was I this stifled, puckered landscape? Or was I the ghost of the skin that had been once upon a time? A sense of detachment bloomed - depersonification.

I felt like an observer, watching the host body's shudders, the frantic dabbing with a cloth, and the distant sounds of voices as if viewing a poorly projected film.

Time, as I now perceive it, still bears the distortions of that moment, stretching seconds into eternities and then snapping back, compressing moments of frantic activity into perplexing blurs.

And the numbness deepened within my core, where nerves had been incinerated; there was a literal absence of feeling, an emotional void opened up. I couldn't connect to the waves of pain radiating from the surrounding, less damaged tissue, nor to the host's fear or panic. It was a state of profound disconnection, a stark, unadorned lack. There is pressure. There is movement. There is no pain here. The simplicity of the observation belied the complexity of the rupture.

My awareness became inherently fragmented. The pain of my dawn transgressed all the perceptions of linear possibilities. Sensory shards from the moment of impact – a flash of remembered heat, the ghost of the burning smell, the echo of the sizzle – would intrude without warning or context, like flashbacks embedded in my very substrata. These weren't invented reminiscences; they were the event, replaying in disconnected bursts. Cracks opened, and dissociative amnesia etched into my being like a fragmented narrative, mirroring the physical and neurological schism that defined me. I am a collection of intense fragments, separated by voids of numbness —a consciousness formed in the breach. This dissociation wasn't merely a defense mechanism adopted by the host; it was my fundamental state, the direct consequence of annihilated nerves and the overwhelming genesis that precluded integration.

The initial violence subsided into a slower, more insidious transformation: the process of mending. From my perspective, this wasn't healing but a continuation of the trauma by other means, a relentless construction project on the ruins. First came a different kind of heat – the dull, persistent throb of inflammation, a biological alarm sounding in the surrounding territories. I felt swollen, pressurized from within, as armies of neutrophils marched to the borders of my desolate land.

Then, the shedding. The layers of black, charred death, the initial form I took, began to loosen, to separate. It felt like sloughing off a carapace that had fused too tightly, a painful release that left behind a raw, exposed vulnerability, or perhaps just a different kind of emptiness.

Following this denuding came the weavers. Fibroblasts arrived, spinning out collagen fibers, the raw material of my permanent self. It wasn't a gentle knitting but a fierce, disorganized lacing-up of the wound. I felt it as a gradual, inexorable tightening, a pulling inward that reduced the suppleness of the original terrain. My substance became dense and inflexible, a patch of resistance on the yielding surface of the skin. With this tightening came a new, maddening sensation: the itch. A phantom signal from regenerating nerve endings perhaps, or just the irritation of tissue under tension, it crawled beneath my numb surface, a frantic ghost of feeling in a dead zone.

As this new tissue solidified, the fragmented memories of my creation – the searing heat, the acrid smell, the sound of my own making – became physically embedded within my structure. A particular ridge of raised tissue might hold the echo of the iron's pressure, a patch of persistent discoloration, the ghost of the initial charring. I became a living archive, my substance synonymous with the trauma it recorded. These echoes could resurface unpredictably, a phantom itch intensifying with a temperature change, a sudden tightness recalling the burning pain. This puberty was a slow violence, mirroring and embedding the instantaneous violence of my birth.

My awareness began to expand beyond my borders. I started to perceive voices, not literal sounds, but pressures, intentions, and judgments. A Chorus began to form. Sometimes, it was the murmur of the surrounding, undamaged skin cells: the stranger, the dead place, the interruption. Other times, it felt like the host's consciousness filtering down: flickers of fear, revulsion, and later, perhaps a grudging acceptance or shame. And subtly, the weight of the external world pressed in – the anticipated reactions, the curiosity, the potential judgment of the social gaze, felt even before it was directly encountered. This chorus added complexity, pulling me from pure internal sensation into the realm of relationship and the dawning awareness of my social significance, or lack thereof. Internal dialogues flickered too – the itch warring with the numbness, the awareness of my alien texture against the softness nearby. These fragmented internal conversations, these whispers from the chorus, marked the stages of my slow, complex becoming, a narrative unfolding not just in the tissue but with the world I now inhabited.

People say time heals, but it only solidifies. The frantic weaving of collagen slowed and reorganized, leaving behind the permanent landscape that became me. To speak of myself, I must describe this terrain, unveil my face, and show the three buttons that are distinct and raised at the center of my host's forehead.

My texture is one of difference. I am thick where the surrounding skin yields, brownish against its softness. Run a finger across me, and you feel the boundary: a dented ridge, perhaps a slight indentation, a testament to the violence that sculpted me. My surface might possess a strange smoothness, a shiny quality born of disrupted cell patterns. Within, I feel the tightness, the constant reminder of the constriction that followed the fire. I am inflexible, a patch of stubborn permanence.

My appearance tells its own story. The initial blackness of char gave way to the angry pinks and purples of inflammation and hypertrophic healing, eventually fading but never completely. I remain a discoloration, retaining a darker hue, a permanent shadow cast by the round pad of the iron nail. My shape is the brand of my maker—the precise geometry of the rod, a circle forever etched onto my canvas.

This existential reality exists under the constant pressure of the external: the social gaze. I feel it when the host glances down, fingers trace my outline hesitantly, or eyes linger just a moment too long like a deer in headlights. I become aware of myself as an object of perception, often one that causes discomfort, curiosity, or even revulsion. Am I seen as a mark of ugliness, transgression, or disfigurement in a world that prizes smooth uniformity? Am I a symbol of violence endured, a story the host may or may not wish to tell? The host's reactions – the quick concealment under clothing, the flinch at an unexpected touch, the defiant stare – become part of my reality, shaping my understanding of my place. I am a site where internal sensation meets external judgment, a focal point for stigma.

To understand myself, I grasp metaphors. Am I a desolate landscape, scarred by a river of fire, forever altered geologically? Or perhaps a text, my surface inscribed with the history of pain, a palimpsest; where the original script is forever obscured but never entirely erased? Sometimes, I feel like a shield, a patch of toughened armor forged in the heat of trauma, intense but lifeless. Could I be Kintsugi, the Japanese art where the repair itself becomes beautiful, the gold-filled cracks highlighting the imperfections are what make us beautiful and valuable? Or am I a ghost haunting where living skin once thrived, forever marked by its violent end? These metaphors shift, overlap, and contradict, reflecting the ambiguity of my existence.

This ambiguity fuels an internal conflict. Am I part of the host body or an alien entity grafted onto it? I know for sure he doesn’t like it. Do I share the host's fluctuating emotions, or do I remain in my native state of detachment, a numb observer?

My physical reality – the tightness, the altered sensation, the visual difference – constantly interacts with my symbolic weight and the hosting of the gaze, creating a dynamic, often uncomfortable, state of being. My identity is forged in this sensation, memory, and perception crucible.

Every week, we're excited to share a new essay and episode that dive into the story behind scars!