Cutis Mea

Take a look at my skin. The biggest organ that I own, that was made just for me.

It is covered in pale lines, with starbursts along my shoulders, and down my arms. This skin is rippling with tiger stripes, and dimples that can fit thumbs. Pinch it, and the skin can turn a peachy pink. Bite it, and the indents of teeth leave ruby hues. Cold, it turns white and soon blue. Burnt and my skin is a painful red, raw. It can turn a red, coppery brown from gentle ease from the sun, darkening and changing.

This is my skin.

Blue/green veins run like rivets underneath, shaping in ways that seem like the peculiar branches of a willow. Skin so thin, the barest touch can trace a groove of the vein. If you pinch my hand, just for a second, you can feel the soft roundness of the vein, slipping from the pinched skin and back to hiding along red flesh.

Underneath those fragile veins are soft muscles, soft sinew that glide over bird like bones, shaping into a limber hand that writes this very ficlet. Turn it over, and you can see some fracturing in the skin. Lines overlaying lines, indents marring like depots on a railway. CLenched, the soft, unburdened skin darkens into a rose quartz, leaving a faint pond of just white flesh, unmarred, unbothered, dead in the center. Going up, there are soft, braidlike rings that outline joints, tiny rings of skin that portion out into fingers.

Each finger breaks and bends into three asymmetrical phalanges, all the same, but all lined up unevenly. My fingers, and my metacarpals, each seperate, each joint with a double ring of braided skin. Stretched out, I can see the ripples and branches of small vessels, intertwining and looping through the flesh. Plump fingers, with the right middle finger calloused from hours of holding a pen. Each finger, on both hands, carries near-invisible scars from various sources.

The whispering crescent scar on the right middle finger, so pale, near non-existent by the mottled colors of the blood running through the flesh in hairs of capillaries. The small bump on the ring fingertip, perfectly round from vampirette nurses pricking for a sweet drop of ironized blood. A straight line of a scar on the index, just under the nail, given a score of a bite from an overly ornery cat.

And the back of the hand. Now there are the more prominent scars. Small starburst shapes that glisten when wet, fooling my mind into thinking water is stuck on the groove of the scar. Shiny, like dew, clean and vibrant of my peach colorings.

The skin on my arms has been said to hold more stories than the skin on my hands.

Long, Milky Way shaped grooves carved by the very fingers typing away at this paper, given birth from stress. Sun-shaped spots from insects biting hard. Razor-thin lines from running through wild hawthorn, from crawling under barbed wire and pulling thistle prickles and cockleburs out of skin and hair. There are so many of these scars. From my arms, to my legs, lines and scratches forever etched from the history of a free ranged livelihood.

My skin is decorated with scars. So many scars. Medallions and ribbons line my dermis like ill gotten trophies.

On the swell my thighs, on the softness of my stomach, and to the sides of my breasts, are thin, silvery lines that mimic the damascus sulcus of tigers. The are indented, delicate, softer than silk, fragile as tissue paper. The same marks are on the curve of my ass, the tender meat of my underarms, scoring and drawn into my skin. And every now and then, I would trace the thin, silvery marks, smiling as my own mother carries her own signature of these lines. So does my grandmother and my sister. All women carry these streaks, our fingerprints of womanhood.

My skin has not only scars.

In careful dots, small, dark pinpricks line my skin. Angel kisses, freckles, my personal constellations. The one on my face, just under the curve of my jaw, nicknamed a beauty mark. The ones on my arms, my wrists, bastardized as witch marks. The ones that peppered my chest, along my shoulders, were blessed with sun kisses.

My skin I have decorated.

I gave myself a butterfly, a collision of colors that were an attempt to perfect a large blemish seared into flesh by hot, boiling hot, oil. With time, i may get more: a poem, a flower, and a palm print.

My skin. Oh, the stories my skin can say. It is a canvas, a picture book, that portrays hardship, carelessness, patience, and grief. My skin can never be replaced. It is always changing. It grows thin from increasing age, supple with introductions of lotions, colorful with the stitched-in colors of a tattoo, or pristine as freshly spun fleece and silk.

My skin can hold and tell of beauty. My skin can sneer and scream ugly.

But this is my skin.

Only mine.

Just mine.

It’s mine.