Skin
by Emily Churilla
I have an obsession with skin. It is an obsession with its colors and textures, the freckles that lay scattered across it, the scars it holds, its pliancy under one’s fingers, and especially its scent.
Lately I’ve been having nightmares where my skin is being stripped in thick long layers from my arms, my shoulders, torso, and legs. Usually there is no perpetrator for this unraveling of my skin from my body like an orange rind, though once I peeled it off myself--wide bloodless strips of flesh and sweat and tattoo hanging clogged from my boyfriend’s three-blade razor. It didn’t hurt, in the dream, and I wasn’t scared. It is only when I wake up that I feel nausea, terror, shame. There are limitless variations of this dream and in yet another version the small silver hoop I wear in my lip is torn by invisible, imaginary, or unknowable forces across and out of my mouth, leaving a gash through my face, leaving my bottom lip hanging ragged. I have no desire to skin myself in waking life. Self-mutilation does not appeal to me, though I do find it a fascinating practice, although you might argue that the hoop through my lip and the ink imbedded in my skin by means of a pulsating needle attests otherwise.
If skin is a necessary boundary, the ribbons of it that are taken nightly from me speak to my vulnerability, the stripping away of my defense capabilities and my inability to retain what I feel is mine. The fact that my modifications, my tattoos and piercing, are the most usual targets speaks to the frailty of my self-construction. Thus, the dreams become ways my inner demons actually show themselves to be outer ones.
I have been stripped of all my possessions--skinned, if you will--several times. Once: after my father died all of my belongings were sold right down to the sheets I slept on. Twice: when I moved out of the house after high school. Thrice: when I was divorced and came to gradschool, carrying with me my cat, Calvin, and, though well into adulthood, those few remains I still had from childhood: books, a rocking chair, a teddy bear, a bow compass set resting in a case lined with navy velvet.
By this time I also carried with me so many things of weight but not material. Memories, of course, but also the burden of transformation. By gradschool I had learned to speak like the proper middle class caucasian I aspired to be seen as. I learned to say wash, not warsh, K-Mart, not K-Marts, how to intricately negate clauses, and to banish the lilting vowels and nasal tones that suggest vodka in plastic bottles, trailer parks, and whatever else middle class folk associate with rural working-classness. I learned to dress like them, to look over my glasses like them, to walk into a room and own it like them. Confidence is key. Never let ‘em see you sweat. I mastered looking nonchalant because nonchalance is a luxury afforded to those people who have things.
Sometimes the artifice falls and I am left standing in exposure and shame. A mispronounced word (it is su-PER-flu-ous, not SU-per-FLU-ous, Emily), a lack of experience (concerts, trips to Europe, things lesser in scale but uncountable in number)--these moments set me again outside the realm of where I attempt to position myself. But what’s funny is that I care nothing about the middle-class: their concerns, aspirations, objects, and ideologies are at best silly to me; at worst they are ignorant, damaging. I do care about being heard, though, and one is not heard if improperly attired. I am able to communicate with you here because I speak your language, albeit with a few more semi-colons. I am wearing your verbal clothing.
I do not yet know what these dreams fully mean. They are (it is) not simply about class, but more likely so about language and becoming. There are so many entry points into the dreams though once inside I cannot find my way around in them. There are too many potential causes for their reoccurrence. There are too many years of pain and reconstruction that build winding staircases in place of elevators. Nevertheless, I will keep wending my way about in them as long as I have them--the dreams and the years.