The koan of skin

It looks after us. Keeps our insides in and bad things out. Thinnest on eyelids, thickest on heels and hands. Where we meet the world, we’re comprised only of dead cells, shed almost carelessly, a million wafers every hour. A pound of dust trails behind the body each year, like clues in a fairy tale. We’re full of holes, too: millions of hair follicles, each a way in and a way out. In the dermis, corpuscles keep us intimately in touch with the world. Heat, breezes, vibrations—we are never not a part of everything. The most sensitive are the fingertips, lips, tongue, clitoris, penis. The brain, however, doesn’t know a damn thing about how something feels—just how it ought to feel. The same touch by lover or stranger evokes vastly different worlds. Who knew the reason you can’t tickle yourself is that you know too much.

color

The cadaver yielded a sliver of skin a millimeter thick, peeled back for the students to see. So thin as to be translucent, the pathologist said, This is where all your skin color resides. Biologically, this is what race is: a flowering of pigment, as though we were beautiful, never hated. As though beauty could seep through corpuscle and artery, up the spine the skull sits upon like a throne, and illumine what sits there like a gray ghost, like a petty king.