The skin of my hands is covered in cuts: three whole cuts, and I don’t know where they came from. It’s wintertime and I’m of the unmoisturized hordes, susceptible to any shelf’s edge. My skin is brittle and splittable, stretched thin like my mother’s skin or my grandpa’s skin, scabbed and liver-spotted skins, skins worn down by MS or a lifetime’s weight.
The body is not tough, but it usually persists. Skin breaks down. Skin rebuilds. Scar tissue is crosswoven, obvious against the natural basketweave. Real cuts, unlike my cuts, leave landmarks. They recall potentials: cheese graters, surgeries, the serrated tongues of geese. They’re damage’s leftovers.
I have a scar centered on my forehead. There used to be a nevus sebaceous there: nickelic dimensions, walnut brown, supple like a thumb in springtime. Classmates would call me Harry Potter, Five Eyes. During puberty, it was fear made manifest: proof of my terminal uniqueness, that I must’ve been marked as a freak for a reason.
My mother had every school photo edited to remove the nevus. She knew one day, by the time I was fourteen, I’d meet a plastic surgeon whose face was Botox tight, shiny like cellophane, a man who could and later did pump me full of laughing gas and tell me to shut up before I came to with my forehead bound by glue.
That scar, hot red and raised, felt so special when I was young. I told people it was a sleeping third eye, a knife fight consequence, or whatever lie that explained I’d slayed the dragon, lifted the expectation.
Fifteen years later, I often forget it was ever there. Looking at my scratched hands, I remember what was so uniquely me. Now, I’m left only with moles, revenant toe warts, a collegiate ritual lighter burn, a larger mole on my shoulder blade that grows hair, and the skin tag on my rib that I once scratched off to see if it’d grow back (it did). All a constellation pointing into itself.
Appearance is not a reflection of personality. It’s the opposite: act the way you look. The disabled who open their own doors, or obese people with any sense of dignity, are unexpected and therefore unwanted. When I had the nevus, I fit the role of a strange kid: quiet, well armed for a war crime trivia night, known to stay awake until dawn watching Law & Order reruns. The scar signals the same. No one believes I earned it in a knife fight. I never lifted the expectation.
Skin is what we know each other by: kiss, touch, memorable faces. The voices and desires are only a supplement to what we can hug and shove. We don’t want our skins to be clues, but there they are and they’re all we can see.
I have at least one friend. J— is fit and healthy, but a real skinpisser. I once helped him move a bed upstairs in his condo. After the first and only flight, he had soaked the pits of his shirt. I felt like a witness to an obscenity, like I caught someone tugging it in public. I worried that J— was ashamed because he knew I saw his sweat, that he was waiting for the moment to escape and dry himself. I feared he was shameless, that he appreciated the AC icing his sweat. I was terrified of everything happening underneath, unseen: glands and muscles in factory motion, straining to win Best in Perspiration, all of it immune to my surface-level critiques.
Knowing J— shouldn’t go beyond the surface, that conduit through which I receive stories and banter, favors and empathy. But that surface can change, by cheese grater or geese or the curse of different skins: dotted with a hundred nevi surveilled by a lazy eye; not Minnesotan pale, but with a spray tan or a natural tan so dark as to be visibly Italian, and his ear is missing, too; not white or Italian, but black and I stop imagining there because I don’t want to unpack that. J— wouldn’t be the same friend.
To think the skin is a signal to and barrier from another is to have internalized my old nevus, as if I slept-walked after surgery, ate my excision before waking, let it metastasize inside my inviting stomach and democratize the judgements that the less obsessive reserve only for themselves.
I see the limit. I can’t see what’s beyond it. Peel back my skin and I’ll call myself Aaron, an Aaron I’m not known to be. Peel back your own skin and we will scream.
-- Aaron Tomey is from Georgia, lived in St. Louis, and now lives in Brooklyn. His essays have previously appeared in Bushwick Burner Phone. He can be found on Twitter @ecstatic_donut.