Scars on the Abdomen? ‘Betty’ certainly had those, but not only those. Poor, dear lady. Her body resembled a railway map, back and front and on either flank, the delineations of cut and stitch a disconcerting statement of weight reducing surgery. And it is not as if it had worked.

Petite and slim, my small-ad had specified, and I ask you to forgive me that because I’d previously spent a score of years married to a pear-shaped lady whose seeming frigidity only revealed its true, sad nature when she abandoned me for another woman.

So I was looking, ere my time ran out, for a lady who liked to fuck and who, should the opportunity arise, I might carry across our connubial threshold without doing my back an injury. I was looking for the ideal of my youth, the faux ideal of every youth; petite and slim.

It’s fortunate that the placers and respondents ‘ male and female ‘ of lonely hearts advertisements cannot be sued for misrepresentation. Betty was ‘petite’ if ‘petite’ means short. I guess she was maybe five foot tall. The trouble is that the same statistic applied to both height and width. And then those scars…

I was very nice to her. I didn’t remonstrate with her about her misrepresentation, was kind to her and, when it became clear that she wanted it to happen, I tried very hard to make love to her.

Don’t misunderstand me. I didn’t despise or dislike her, and I didn’t take exception to her being overweight, despite that she had claimed otherwise in her reply, nor did her being overweight mean that I could not find beauty and desirability in her. That the bald-headed hermit lived up to his name with a vengeance, shrunk so small that he was deeply cowled in foreskin as if he, poor chap, could not bring himself to cast a one-eyed glance at her, was not a consequence ‘ directly ‘ of her build.

Nor directly was it her endless scars and their resemblance to seams on the edge of splitting, but it was the mentality of the woman who had allowed these things to happen to her in pursuit of an objective she would never reach, the mentality of a woman cognisant of every twist and turn in every contemporary soap opera and whose bathroom and bedroom were universally and mind-blowingly pink. Then again my poor cock may simply have been stunned by the perfume everywhere.

In all it simply made me deeply sad, and if my cock were to make any movement that night it would be in the direction of the door.

‘Dianna’ had no scars upon her abdomen that I can remember, though those poignant, lovely scars, the silvered rivulets of stretch-marks, must surely have been there. The scar she herself hated and which only the greatest tenderness could overcome, was a scar that ran the length of the underneath of her breasts at the conjunction with her torso.

Twelve years old, she’d been, when her parents inflicted that upon her because, they had decided, she was far too well-developed for her age.

I loved that scar, and I loved her for it and I miss her still, now that we’ve moved on. Scars themselves don’t trouble me. Not physical ones at least. There is not a natural form that does not scar and in particular forms ‘ in that of trees, for example ‘ the scars are merely signs of growth , maturity and ever-accumulating beauty. The scars of childbirth are a badge of honour, testament to the very womanliness of woman, the bearer of creation’s glorious gateway into fulfilment and into life.

Other scars mean other problems. ‘Ellen’ was my ideal of youth, the profoundest love I had ever known, and her body was an elegy, a poem of beauty in her sweet, modest, pink-peaked breasts, the delightful curves of her lovely bottom, her slender limbs, her perfect cunt.

Like hand and glove we fitted, like hand and beloved, long lost glove at that. Inside that sweet moistness of her, the soft, delicious, smooth-skinned flesh of her so soft against my own, I found the miracle I had so long sought. And between those wondrous thighs I knew the joy of the questing knight, found my holy grail, my water of life, kissed it, licked it, drank and tasted it.

The tender tendril scars of three childbirths lay upon her slender form and I loved them, with my heart, my lips, my tongue. Lower yet that same holy grail and magic gate which had brought three lives into the world had returned to miraculous slenderness and gripped me, held me, rippled close about me so many lovely, gentle times.

But gentle times they needed to be. Almost unmarked she wore yet livid scars of a vastly different nature, the scars left by abusive men and ready to open and bleed at any more than the gentlest touch.

Too often it took Mary-Jo and Johnny Haig to assuage her hidden pain and, in the end, it was compound fear which would not let the worst scar heal. She had learned not to trust her own nature and found the joy of being truly loved too painful to persist with.

She broke my heart, nearly broke my spirit, left me alone, sore wounded and deeply bereaved. I carry those scars still, will carry them to my grave, and any other scars, today, must leave me quite unmoved.

Whoever you are, woman, if you are reading this, know that you are beautiful. It is your nature and your birthright. Meddle with that beauty at your peril. And if you are man and reading this, remember, you are charged with the stewardship of the Earth’s greatest, most wondrous gift. Wound it and, if there is a judgement yet to come, know that you are damned and are mine enemy.

You have scarred life itself. The convenient pretext that you know not what you do, that you are powerless in the face of your own instincts, the shallow games of fucking that leave the hearts of women unloved, untouched, unfulfilled and wanting, the heartless jibes, torments and abandonments which make it too easy to quit the temples into which you have broken for no better purpose than pillage, all are wounds that gut the belly of Life.

You have made of me and my kind, the undangerous stranger, a threat to the women at whom we would wish to smile in cognizance of their loveliness, behind whom we are sometimes compelled to walk, the very echo of our footsteps threatening. In order to be me, I have to prove I am not you, time after time after time.

That scar, that baleful, red, raw scar, I deeply, furiously resent.

© 2010 Richard Raiment. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.