I noticed it before I even understood what it meant. A faint circle resting high on my mother’s shoulder, too deliberate to be random and too quiet to demand explanation. Even as a child, I felt it carried a story no one had told me yet, but,
Its shape was strangely precise, a soft ring of tiny impressions around a deeper center, almost like a symbol pressed gently into her skin long ago. I never asked about it, yet it shaped how I saw her—strong, silent, marked by something bigger than I could grasp at the time. And even now, I still wonder what moment in her life left that permanent reminder behind, therefore,