Skin

I started this about a week ago, so this is the introduction to the introduction.  Also, I’m far too honest sometimes.

Sorry that the only decent material I can write is sappy bullshit about girls and awkward conversations and imaginary conversations.  I haven’t been on a walk in a while, I’ve been taking smaller nips off the bottle, and last week was pretty stressful (all better now).

Skin weirds me out.  I feel this way because it’s so damn complicated.  It’s not a nice, uniform slab of smooth muscle like the heart or that mushy undercooked bowl of Quaker Oats that somehow forms the entirety of human intellect.  Those organs have pieces but they’re too small for us to care.  Skin is like the jell-O mold that your grandmother makes with all the different fruits and crap in it.  It’s got capillaries running through it, sweat and sebaceous glands dotting the landscape here and there, and hairs with little arrector pili muscles that pull them up when I get cold or listen to Schubert.

My skin is so-so, strangely tan for a northeastern boy, especially one with so much English and Irish blood.  I have a lot of hair on my arms and legs, a few freckles and one mole that I’m paranoid about.  The skin on my right shoulder is covered by a pinstriped Dockers shirt and a grey tee with a logo on it.  And now it’s being compressed..squashed, just a little bit.  As the dermis gives way like foam rubber, I feel a tickle.  It’s nice.  Someone’s touching me IT’S HER

I’m invisible.  Like, to everybody.  Must have been an accident.

    No, that was a poke.

    That was a goddamn poke.

She’s disappointed that I wasn’t surprised.  I miss the opportunity to make much conversation about it, but that shouldn’t matter, and screw it, anyway.  I’m disappointed that I still don’t know what the hell that meant. 

    “Yeah, I can do that.  Sure, no problem.”