“My good side is not that strong.”
“Perhaps you haven’t had the chance to use it.”
“Maybe... I don’t know.”
“I’m not that special,” he says after pondering for a second.
“You are to me.”
He looks at me, intrigued. Unable to hold his eyes, I move my gaze over his torso.
“What’s the story of your scars?” I ask, tipping my chin and softly pointing to his chest. “Each tattoo sits next to a scar.”
He looks down and studies them as if seeing them for the first time.
I read sadness in his eyes.
He trails a few of them with his fingers.
“Every scar has a story,” he adds, his fingers trailing the ragged lines.
“This one was a flame lick...” he says, pointing to the small area on his flank just above the waistband of his swim trunks.
He glances at me.
“Jacob’s accident,” he says, his eyes darkening as the memory comes back to him. “He was on his bike, and I was in my car, following him. We were going home. At an intersection, he turned right. A car sped through a red light and snagged him. Threw him off. He slid onto the ground, and the bike spun and crushed him. He lost his conscience, and the motorcycle caught on fire, the flames spreading over him. I jumped out of the car and pulled him away from his bike, but it was too late. He never regained his conscience. That’s how I got burned,” he says, his fingertips resting on a small, satin-like patch of scar tissue.
I lift my gaze.
“What about the one on your chest?” I ask, pointing to the mark between his pecs.
He lets out a sigh and looks into the distance.
“That’s a long story,” he says quietly, his blue-gray eyes shifting back to me as he slowly runs his fingers through his hair, suddenly rueful.
A few moments of silence pass before he speaks again.
“Sara and I had a good childhood...” he says, weighing his words. “My family wasn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, but we had everything we wanted. My parents loved each other and us. And they did the best they could for us. My father had a well-paying job that required him to work a lot and travel extensively. A sixty-hour workweek was the norm for him. He never had a health problem, yet one day he collapsed in his office and never made it home. The last time I talked to him was that very morning. Proud, he hugged me and patted me on my back, congratulating me for a story I’d written and given him to read the night before. I never thought he’d have the time to skim it, let alone read it, but he did it somehow.”
He trains his eyes on the small waves breaking against the shore.
“I was so happy that day,” he says. "It was one of the best days of my life before it turned out to be the worst,” he mutters, his voice almost breaking.
He flicks his eyes at me and puts on a brave face and a faint smile, yet he can’t hide the soft quiver of his lips.
“It was one of those special moments when you know–– even if you’re only a kid––that the memory of that day will stay with you forever. I’d never written anything before, and it was only a simplistic story, but the fact that he had praised me meant the world to me.”
His smile withers away.
“It was not much, but it was everything to me.”
He pauses, fighting his emotions back.
“He was gone by the end of the day,” he says coldly.
My eyes dip as he scraps his lip with his teeth.
“That’s why I always say… You can never tell. There is no perfect anything. Life is all you can grab at any moment, no matter how imperfect it is. People like to plan and wait and pick and choose.” He chuckles, shaking his head. “And while doing all that, life slips through their fingers and never comes back. Then one day, regret is all they have. All the things they didn’t do or didn’t love come back to them to haunt them. Whether was someone they could’ve loved or work they could’ve put their hearts into. A kid, a pet, or even an adventure. All those things are gone. Life is fluid. It comes and goes. There are no guarantees. There is no fairness.”