That's what the scar reminds me of. It is the dust cast off by one giant moment, by a life I was living, by a drawing that I owned. I got the scar in the kitchen of my house, a house I lived in for eight months before I couldn't live in that house anymore. I got the scar while I was cooking Peas in a Creamy Red Sauce, the recipe by Madhur Jaffery, given to me by the stepmother who became my stepmother four years ago, the recipe one she cooked in the kitchen of the house she and my father bought together when they decided to admit to one another that this was it, for real, for keeps. I was on the last part of the recipe, the part where you heat three tablespoons of vegetable oil and throw in a tablespoon of mustard seeds and a tablespoon of coriander, wait for them to pop and then pour in two packs of defrosted peas.

I lit the gas with the match the way we had to because the stove couldn't catch because a mouse liked to live there and with its tail turn off the pilot light, and it made the vegetable oil hot, three tablespoons of it. I'm used to cooking with olive oil — the Columela brand was the best, I read in Cook's Illustrated, those illustrations so part of that life I lived — so the vegetable oil confused my visual cortex for a minute. The oil was on the front burner of the stove in the kitchen I was sharing with the man whose life I was living, in the pan that belonged to his mother and his grandmother before her, a New Orleans line. The pan was big and old and perfect for this recipe, large enough to be able to spin the mustard seeds around while they popped. I'd cooked this dish four or five times and every time I made it the kitchen got covered in the cast away debris, like the dust from the scar.

The vegetable oil got hot, I guess, but I couldn't tell because it stays inert unless you throw water in it or, as my stepfather who taught me how to cook taught me, spit in it. I noticed the smell, then, and how something wasn't quite right about it. I thought maybe the pan, which we had just picked up from his mother's house after she had picked it up in Texas, packing up in preparation, that maybe it wasn't clean enough, or maybe something had been left over from the last time I'd made the Peas in a Creamy Red Sauce, and I thought maybe it was time to throw out the oil and start over.

I picked up the pan but my visual cortex was confused and where it should have seen a layer of hot oil it saw inert, clear liquid, mistook it for water. I picked up the pan and I picked it up too quickly and I meant to take it to the sink and pour out the liquid, the burning hot oil, but instead the oil slopped over the side and into my leg. I was wearing yoga pants because I was trying to change my life and yoga seemed to be a good way of going about that, but the drawback to my chakras being realigned and my energies being good and my practice having been dedicated and my having accepted into my life Shiva, the God of destruction, was that the pants were cotton and when the hot oil fell on them they only pulled it closer to my skin.

The oil began to cook the top of my leg, in the shape of Iceland or the British Isles or maybe Denmark, I do not know because I am not a geographer, but I do know that it hurt.

It doesn't hurt anymore, the scar, but it reminds me of the life I was living, and it reminds me of the things I left behind. It reminds me of the drawing that we bought, and how it's there and I'm here, here for now being a transient space, in between, dislocated. I'm living now like the dust cast off from the comet of that life, and it's a beautiful dust, and I can see that it's on its way to the complete part of the scar. The scar reminds me of the drawing, Lead Pencil Studio's ,After, the piece we bought together in Seattle's Lawrimore Project after a dinner we had there hosted by an architect where we ate bento boxes provided by a chef who is very famous in Japan, we promise.

The scar reminds me of that moment of buying that art, the purchase of culture in some way more of a sign of togetherness than the purchase of real estate or furniture, but when I see the scar now I don't think of how much I wish I had the art — although, sometimes, I do — but of how quickly we can recover from these things. When I see the scar now I remember how hopeful I felt when I bought the art, thinking that maybe that was part of the life that I was wanting to live but for some reason couldn't, a reason I couldn't figure out why until I realized that I had to cast myself off from that main island of my life and be like the comet dust.

The scar reminds me of the other scars and the other art, of the time I cried in a restaurant in Yountville after falling into Richard Serra's gravity, and of the time he cried in a restaurant in Chicago after I felt that Anish Kapoor would fall on me. The scar reminds me of all the scars we pick up, of all the memories of food and art — because it all, in the end, comes down to the three of food and art and sex and we do not write about the third, not here or now — and the scar reminds me that it is those scars we carry, those little bits of comet dust, that those are the art that we'll really take with us, that doesn't need to be split or divided or fought over. The scar reminds me that I'm about to and do already live a life of food and art — and sex, although we not write about that, not here or now — and it'll fade and blend and leave, and so will the memories, and even though sometimes I'll wish the scar was brighter or the memories were different, it will all be good.

And the scar reminds me that I know there's a comet, that I won't always be dust.