CCA Confidential

Our latest assignment for 4D Visual Dynamics was to complete any of the assignments from www.learningtoloveyoumore.com. I choose topic 11: photograph a scare and write about it.

This is what I wrote about my scare:

The year was 1979, August, and I was 11 months old. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in La Hoya. I was crawling, and getting around fairly quick. My mother had been ironing. The iron was off, but it was still hot. Like most toddlers I was very interested in everything used by my parents, including the iron. While my mother wasn’t looking, I pulled the cord, and iron fell straight down on to my hand.

The burn was bad. Third degree. The damage went down to the cellular level. The entire top side of my hand was burned. Because of the location, a skin graft wasn’t a good option.

So I have spent my entire self-aware life with a hand shaped burn on my hand. It isn’t foreign to me, it is part of my self image. As I grew, the burn stayed the same size. New skin wrapped the rest of my hand, but you can still see the small imprint of my baby hand on top of my adult hand.