Aging Skin

         During the majority of my college career, I was so driven to obtain a degree that I lost touch of things you don't need a degree to experience in life: passion, intimacy, being vulnerable, wearing your heart on your sleeve, living in the moment. The future became my end goal, and now that the future is the present, I'm caught in this tight skin that has worn thin with missed opportunities and a loss of identity.

         I don't see myself in the mirror anymore, and surely that isn't a good sign. My sex drive is insatiable, though when I get the real thing it leaves much to be desired. I want to have someone hold me without fear when I'm weak, and I want to be fearless in my desire to be held. I used to write, I used to read, I used to enjoy my own body and I used to know that love existed. I used to have nothing else to think about. I used to let love be me. I used to be happy in love with myself, my life, my possibilities.

         Possibilities involve hope and optimisim. Thin skin can't absorb those things. Thin skin just itches, itches to the point of ripping apart and being taken into a state of death and shrinking into an exact smallness, if not nothingness, a speck of matter light enough to be seen floating in the air or lingering in dirty bedsheets. A dead speck of skin, this smallness, this simpler state of being. Dead things don't need an excuse for being disconnected or not being able to feel. Where else in life is there not a need for an excuse? Nowhere else in life is there no need for a rationalization out of a state of guilt or depression or helplessness or loneliness or aloneness but death.

         Why does my skin want to fall off? It's been ages since I've left the cocoon. It was soft there, and the sun was warm in my youth.