flexibility and rigidity.

Scars and stretchmarks are made of the same thin skin, anomalies in the smooth soft surface of the body. The thin white-brown-purple skin is a synecdoche, a part of the physical surface standing in for that of the whole being. I have spots of thin skin, in lines I have made and that nature has made for me. I also do not have a thick skin. In the hospital and the doctor’s offices and at school they tell me to develop one, that my health is just a matter of the thickness of my skin. My skin, I want to scream, is thin; it is naturally that way, I like it that way, you can touch it and see it: the soft scar tissue and the veins that show through. Why should what I am make me suffer?

This thin skin, this two-part metaphor, all comes from the same place. It comes from too much, too fast. My stretch marks come from the skin of a child stretching over the body of a woman. My scars come from the mind of a child stretching to deal with the heart of a woman. This oldness within youngness leads to thin, thin skin, regardless of action: breaking or not breaking, the consequences are the same. White lines, pink lines, brown lines, variegations I can feel with my fingertips and see with eyes and know all the time. These things are insideness on the outside. These things are being old and young and wise and innocent all at the same time, being lost in a rush of too much too fast.