2006-05-11

Our summer skin

Know that as I write these words, I do so with sausage fingers. They are Ukrainian, or Russian, we're not sure, and they are strong with large knuckles like the great backs of the Caucuses from which they are descended. But one little piggy is causing me grief. One little piggy is more piggy than the rest. He was sprained, or twisted, yesterday in our inaugural Frisbee game of the season, and so now appears morbidly obese. I don't know what happened, exactly, only that a collision took place, and while the other guy went flying, my finger made some creative noises and swelled to the finger sausage size I expect when I am 80, not 26. Keystrokes cause flecks of pain; straightening this sausage is out of the question. Ditto with making a fist. I am certain it will heal with ice and rest, but this is my first real day off in over a week, and so I must employ my shiny new wrinkle-free digit, this Rudolph of the hand herd, different than all the rest, the one that does the emphatic pointing and takes care of the aitch's and enn's and jay's and a few others 'bee'-sides, because writing is what I like to do best, most-usually-door-jamb-injured-finger-when-moving-awkward-furniture or no.

There is a new girl at my coffee shop. She seems nice enough, but her eyes - which are too large - have a calculating and distinctly avian quality about them, as if she might, without notice, smash her face into your hand like a greedy ostrich, mistaking loose change for grain, her clipped little beak causing you to laugh like surprised children do, 'IT'S EATING RIGHT OUT OF MY HAND!', and then the delay, and the crying, which almost always follows the feeding of wildlife, accompanied as it often is by the dawning realization that you are, in fact, bleeding. That is what is most frightening as a child. Seeing the crimson liquid spill away in the face of surprise and laughter - there should be pain, you think - and that is the shock of youthful summer skin.

I remember the first time I bled - or rather, I remember the first time I remember having bled - I had fallen off my bike of course. There was a little chunk of skin missing from my thumb, a deep chunk, as if someone had taken a core sample, but only a few millimetres wide. I peered in it at, confused, and then the red came marching out, and I cried because it was new, because I did not understand what was happening. I cried and biked all the way home as fast as I could, away from my friends without a word, embarrassed about everything. That small chunk of missing skin made me consider the possibility that I was breakable, and that consideration perplexed me so, completely unaware I was at the time that it would be the first of many increasingly existential crises I would face as my brain and consciousness developed over the years.

Like when a certain someone, probably your Mom, first explained to you that she too was once a little girl, the shock it had caused, because it implied she had changed, that she hadn't always been this magical being charged with your upkeep and well being, this angel, because she too had once skinned her knees and pondered the meaning of the warm liquid drooling out, because it meant that there had been a 'before me' and that meant I hadn't existed at some point; this shock, it was tangible, it crept slowly, stalking you, like the day you walked into familiar surroundings and came upon a large flightless bird standing motionless by the espresso machine.

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