Three. It’s the Magic Number.

I have been itching to write a diptych or a triptych for a couple of months, and finally the subject matter appeared. This is still pretty rough, but it’s the process, man. It seems like the best ideas always hit on the busiest days – this one showed up while I was driving to Midtown this morning, at the start of a ridiculously packed couple of days. When I had a chance to sit down tonight, I set a timer for ten minutes for each of the three items, and went with total stream of consciousness, no letting up for even a second, until the timer went off. It’s harder than it sounds, and I haven’t done something like that in years, probably since college. It felt amazing. I spent the evening paring it all down to a few paragraphs.

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Skin

I. Scars
These disruptions on your arms and forehead, behind your knees, and under your chin, lines smooth and white, hairless, sweatless, are like the skin of a newborn. Injuries packed away in fibrous tissue become invisible in the dark.

Were you pushed over the hood of a car, pushed off a bike, pushed through broken glass? What is it that your skin remembers in those smooth interruptions?  I remember falling on gravel, falling on concrete, falling under the calloused fingers of a splintered man.

Keep the lights off: it is not that I don’t want you to see my scars, it is that I do not want to see yours.

II. Tattoos
We mark the occasions with pictures. Portraits, flowers, stars, and symbols tell our version of the story, etched a fraction of an inch below the skin.

It starts with a million little wounds. Paint and blood mix as we are broken, over and over again. The skin is slick and raw, the colors bright, and we walk away with our wound wrapped in plastic. It oozes and bleeds for a few days. Then it is art.

Now, look: a tattoo is just close enough to the surface for everyone to see, and just deep enough to be permanent.

III. Wrinkles
I will be as wrinkled as the skin of a rotting peach one day. Laughing, smoking, crying and so much talking will drag their tracks across my face, but the most important parts of the body are born wrinkled and rolled.

Those creases that will someday overtake my whole body are not just markers of what has been, but what is yet to be created. Everything that is made is made from the memories in the skin.

This is why we come together: for the skin to tell all of the stories we don’t yet know how to tell.

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Not surprisingly, lately I’ve been thinking about getting another tattoo.