Skinned
I believe I’ve lost my skin. I’m walking around in a messy tangle of internal organs. The ten thousand fragments of my heart are the least of my worries when I’m a skinned being.
There’s my stomach that’s threatening to leak or puncture and spill the secrets of the dinner I did not have and the 2 a.m. snack I ingested, instead. Then there are intestines, large and small, fighting like my country and the neighbour that we’re most painfully aware of. They’re attached but they resent every microcosm of it and they’re on the verge of ugly war any second.
No, he didn’t get under my skin. You don’t understand. My skin has been completely vaporized in the aftermath of bad decisions. After being forced to be thick for my sanity’s sake, my skin has thrown in its lot in despair and sought better working conditions elsewhere. As a tanned leather trophy decorating his walls, for instance.
My reproductive system is another story altogether. As a child, I thought my organs would fall out of my vagina if I didn’t keep my legs closed firmly shut. Now spasms keep running up and down like naughty children training for a horror-thon. And my uterus is staging a coup on my stomach. Having a direct connection to the central nervous system doesn’t help when it’s flooding my dreams with disturbing images of unborn babies.
There is of course the utterly ridiculous and useless attempt to hold in liquid without a solid container. All the blood and plasma and bile and saliva and other watery things my body produces, seem to be reined in by a thin, invisible border. Any second now, when the warring factions of my internal organs declare a victor, the order to spread out and cause anarchy will ensue. I walk with my elbows digging into my waist, holding on to the vain hope that control at the equatorial centre will delay the fallout of this war. The literal falling out of everything that is inside me, that makes me.
Occasionally, I retreat into my bones. They’re still intact and provide a temporary shelter from the gruesome sights of this in-body war. But there’s nothing in there, nothing to subsist on, nothing to hold onto, nothing to do but wait for everything outside to fall apart. No, actually there are a whole lot of bad memories. Deep inside my bones, where there are no sights or sounds, only feelings, is that one overpowering feeling – defeat.
My skin, it’s hanging in a glass case of trophy memories. And until a new one grows back, my insides are in a state of World War III.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
*This post was actually written a month ago but I sent it in as an entry to a site I really like. Apparently, they didn’t reciprocate the sentiment. I am in a different place now but I haven’t quite shaken off the memory. So here it is.
