Spring 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 2

I was in dance class when a mild horror pulled the instructor’s face awry. Her tone was accusatory. “You’re bleeding.”

A thin line of blood trickled down from midway up my thigh. I pressed my hand against the tiny, inconsequential wound until the blood stopped running, but she kept staring at me, her mouth twisting, eyebrows rising. I shrugged. “I just randomly bleed sometimes.” Until I was in my thirties, I thought everyone did.

Her expression turned to one of disgust. Her upper lip pulled up as though to block her flared nostrils. Even though she didn’t step back, her head pulled away from me, doubling her chin.

Not my fault she is grossed out by my skin. I inherited this leaky packaging from my mother. Inherited this folliculitis. This keratosis pilaris. I’m not smooth and taut like a perfect apple. I’m a fuzzy kiwi oozing juice, but as a teen, I was a pizza. Pepperoni pustules and peppery blackheads and mozzarella whiteheads hid behind my curly curtain of hair. Wearing my hair down like that only made things worse. Hormones will do that.

I’m generally much more comfortable in my skin these days, and my skin is more comfortable, too–especially since I stopped shaving and turned hairy as a rambutan.

I was at the final rehearsal for my flamenco performance when the choreographer suddenly turned to me, face blazing with some expression I couldn’t quite understand. Then the words  blurted from her: “Shave those god awful armpits.”

My answer was just as abrupt. “No.”

Her eyes blinked rapid-fire. “Why not?”

“Because I have a skin condition and don’t want my armpits to leak blood and pus.”

Even if I didn’t have a skin condition, my body hair was none of her concern. If it was such a problem, why not ask me to wear sleeves? Would she have been so judgmental if she’d thought I was a man?

I stopped shaving and waxing my armpits over a decade ago, and now I no longer have pizza pits. Since I successfully completed puberty, there’s no more pizza face. Instead, dull accretions of melanin creep across my hands, arms, and legs. My upper lip, once smooth and peach-fuzzed, looks like a boy’s first patchy moustache perched atop a wrinkled mouth. My hormones are in flux again. Age spots my fine crevasses of wrinkles. My skin grows scaly as my faulty packaging goes through another transformation. Cherry angiomas crop up here and there, ripe and juicy red. Dead skin no longer sloughs off on its own. Even though I no longer depilate, I have to spend more time on skin care than ever before or it grows thick and ashy. No one told me that menopause would do this to me.

When I had my skin cancer removed years ago, the dermatologist stitched me up. My ankle was dressed for Hallowe’en. The doctor smiled as he tugged the needle through. “I love young skin.”

The wound with its black sutures bulged like a pouting mouth. I looked from it to him. “Why?”

“Because old skin tears like wet paper.”

And now that old age creeps up, my skin crepes up. Crepe paper cannot survive a needle and thread. I’m an old banana and my skin is bruised and spotty. Off to the doctor I went again. A new doctor, this time. In went the needle, injecting me with freezing. It didn’t feel like freezing. It felt like jolts of lightning. Plasmic pain. It was time for two more punch biopsies, and this time my skin wasn’t so young. But this time the skin was in places under less tension: my inner thigh and my mid-back. I gripped the wall while she tore out little pieces of my skin. I almost knocked the painting down. My juices ran freely, like overripe cherries. Red juices sopped up by cotton. Pressure applied to stop the leaking.

It took weeks for the stitches to heal. The spot on my thigh is still cherry-red. When I’m in hot water it turns dark. I hide it with my hand from other people. The spots were benign, but now they’re darker than ever.

May my cancer never come back lest my fuzzy kiwi, bruised banana skin be perforated by stitches which cannot heal. And even when I finally become a prune, long may my outsides keep my insides in.