This is my body.

Lately I have felt like a stranger in this skin. I’m not saying that metaphorically. Literally, I feel as if I am just meeting this body; estranged by the shape and texture of the thing.

The mottled melanin of these forearms, the sudden spattering of red pinpricks across the backs of both hands. My fingernails growing thick and strong at an impossible rate, somehow always dirty. Somehow always carrying a bit of each day close, so close to my skin. There are scars, and scars, and scars. The purplewhite stretch marks across breasts and hips. I am amazed by all the woman of this body. All the soft.

All the pale.

Portland sunlight has leached my skin lighter than its ever been. Just beneath the surface, all those bluegreen highways so visible. A fine splay of veins rooting in the hollows of the pelvis. The hours, and hours, and hours spent beneath fluorescent lights. The late nights and little sleep. Brow struck somewhere between concern and amazement, like my forehead is constantly either crumpling or testing its uppermost boundaries.

So unfamiliar, this skin.

And yet this is the body that used to tear full-bore around the corners of our Montana backyard, hands and knees, caught up in a 6 year-old’s intricate world of fantasies. I was a dog. No a bear. No a lion. Something with claws and teeth, something fiercely independent.

This is the body that bled at 9. Cotton child panties stained black and tarry, stuffed into the bottom of the hamper where my mother found them a week later. How she held them up questioningly and the only thing I recognized as blood was the rush of heat to my face. Shame. My first lesson in woman.

This is the body that huddled in cheap plastic chairs, spending lunches in the high school library. Too afraid to brave the cafeteria. Devouring books and baggies of Goldfish snack crackers smuggled in in my pockets. This body, learning the backache of lonely.

This is the body that knelt on a friend’s bedroom floor, brought the lips to her lips for those inexplicable minutes. I’ve never kissed a girl before, have you? A memory of a boy, the dark parking lot where I kissed him. His mouth like a car crash, all twisted metal and confusion. His wet tongue groping and desperate. Her mouth so soft, no demands, just curiosity. Isn’t it strange to be kissing and feel absolutely nothing? My head nods agreement. My body thinks nothing feels an awful lot like something.

This is the body that lost the bet. This is the body that lost control. This is the body that woke bruised and naked in that basement on the edge of town. Clothes in the corner soaked in beer and piss. A barrage of angry text messages when I recovered my phone from the front lawn. I can’t believe you let him fuck you. His fingerprints bruised into my arms for a week. The ache of pinned wrist memories. This is the body that took a pill purchased by a friend’s mother and given as a birthday present. This is the body that bled at 17, purging a night of Stupid bitch, you had it coming from the hollow of me.

This body wouldn’t drink whiskey again for years. This body learning survival. Something with claws and teeth. Something fiercely independent.

But this is that body that has loved, and loved, and loved. Soft under so many hands. The memory of breath stirring between shoulder blades. Warmth. The weight of this body draped sleeping across or beside another human.

The skin so soft. The skin cold. The skin feverish, furnacing lovers into meltdown. The skin clammy, and most comfortable under a layer of cotton. The skin sweatslick and gliding easy.

Lately I have felt like a stranger in this skin because it as been so long since I sat down and examined it with anything but a fleetingly critical eye. I pause long enough to flash a smile in the mirror, then turn quickly away. Afraid of all the things I might find if I let my gaze linger. Afraid of the ways I have aged and changed. This body, this skin. So many stories held in the tension of my shoulders, in the softening of my belly. Waiting to be read. Waiting to be written. Look at the ways I’ve survived.

Look at the ways that I live.