For Christopf, as promised.
It might have been there a week or more, a month even. She could barely remember the last time she’d considered herself naked.
Of course one sees small sections of nakedness daily- an elbow here, a red, raw heel there, a slice of just washed buttock dancing across the shower room mirror- but it had been three weeks at least, possibly four, since she’d last appeared tip to toe naked in the bedroom mirror and really, truly looked.
At first it was only a small patch, barely noticeable, exactly the shape and size of an overripe banana. It curled across her abdomen, left to right like a downturned smile. “If I stand on my head,” she thought, running an exploratory finger across her angry skin, “My belly will be smiling back at me.” And this thought, coupled with twenty eight years of seasick livings, seemed enough to prove her lifelong suspicion that days were better done upside down.
It was red. Skin afflictions are almost always red.
One week later it was a string of sausages belted round her middle, reaching up to meet her left breast and all the way down to cup both knees. By August of the same year all her naked parts were covered in a thick scab of red raw Velcro. Her hands and feet, fingers and earlobes quickly followed suit. Only her face remained clean. It was a shame for her face had never been her strongest feature. Given the choice she’d have pleaded for two newborn ankles and the smoothly freckled space behind her forearms.
She soldiered on, sweating through September in long pants and ski hats.
It was relatively easy to cover the naked parts, sliding sweaters and jeans over the Velcro. She grew thick to the daily injustice of plucked threads and worn fabric. Her old clothes- the frocks and blouses of her Summer days- were inapproachable now and aloof; soft-skinned victims of the cut. Sometimes she passed long afternoons visiting in the crook of the bedroom closet, sipping on tea and neatly-folded anecdotes while the silks and the soft, sweet cottons smiled lazily and laughed, and at the final second, shirked from her touch. Eventually in tears- as much for herself, as her bedroom closet- she packed her pretty dresses and nylons into paper sacks and sent them to the Goodwill. One third uglier than last Christmas, she wore Carhartts by day and sweatpants by night, careful not to catch on herself.
Hands and feet were harder.
Gloves were good for outside and shoes par for the course, but the inside times and those unmasked moments when handshakes and well-meaning side sweeps crept up announced, remained a sticky, pickled mess. Despite her best efforts she caught on everyone and everything, who chanced at honest touch.
She was a sticking pole for the first time in forever and though it itched from time to time she could not believe her own good fortune.
And if from time to time, a particular young man should step close enough to seem somewhat more sticky than the other young men, she’d consider the possibility of catching for a life time on just the one person.
“Grab on,” she’d say, “I’m covered in Velcro. I can’t let go.”
“I can see that,” he’d reply, “You’re caught on almost everyone and everything you’ve ever known. There’s barely an earlobe left for me.”
“It’s particularly strong Velcro. An earlobe should be more than enough to last the Winter.”
Sometimes the young man would pinch her earlobe so hard his fingerprints could still be read both backwards and forwards some six months later. On other occasions the young man might stand several feet back, singing radio songs over the heads of the gathered mass until everything, even the old lady breathing down the collar of her sweatshirt, seemed caught in the closing seconds of a Christmas movie. More often than not he simply laced his boots and left town for a girl who could not promise Velcro yet kept more than an earlobe available for casual romantics.
It was a shame and she was growing older with the pinch of it.
Though she was never short of a good friend- seventy six of them hung from her elbows every time she left the house, swinging like chandelier drops from her wrists and ankles- she was almost ready to walk the odd street in silent shoes. Though her days were full of strong arms and her nights swole with other people’s dreams, she could barely sleep for the throng of them. Though she wandered from town to town, talking coffee to the kids and stronger coffee to the older folk, she could not shirk the warm shrug of familiar voices grafted to the base of her tongue. When she cried it was never a single kind of sadness, when she laughed it was a multi-pack sort of laugh and when, on the rare occasions she found yelling necessary, the whole town rioted round her shirt sleeves.
She was tired lately and selfish from the way her arms seemed longer now and would perhaps, never return to their normal length.
Unpeeling these fingers and faces was a painful, time-consuming procedure. It required nails, scissors, small metal implements and difficult conversations, a whole month of bloody, loveless, loss to unpick herself one strand of Velcro at a time. Waking from these operations she would find herself not only smarting from the latest amputation but already more than firmly caught on a brand new friend. “Good Lord,” she thought, noticing the way her skin had stretched six thousand miles in one brief year. “Is there no end to all this attachment?”
Eventually she took a razor blade from the bathroom cabinet and sliced herself clean. The Velcro puddled viciously beside the bath mat, just waiting on its next victim. Standing naked in her own smooth skin, she admired the cut of her wrists and the clean shoulders which had previously played home to so many hands and heavy heads.
“This is the first day of everything I’ve always planned to do and never quite got round to,” she said though there was no one there to catch her resolve.
She made a cup of coffee and rode to the coast alone. With no one attached at the hip it was once again possible to ride a bicycle.
She thought about the time they had driven to California with someone’s conservative brother dragging on the base of her spine and how they’d chosen radio songs to compliment this conservative brother’s conservative tastes. “Oh I like this one,” he’d shouted, “It has a good part for whistling right at the start.” So they’d played this one song a dozen times on repeat, each time stumbling to get the whistling just right, tumbling into oceans of easy, easy laughter. In all these stop rewind attempts the whistling had never once been perfect but the whole car had wriggled reassuringly with the weight of sticky souls and speeding laughter.
At the coast alone she wrote a postcard home. “You know that song with the whistling part,” she wrote, “The California one for your conservative brother? Well I can whistle it perfect now with no one here to make me giggle.” She spent several coastal seconds alone debating between love and regards, eventually sending the postcard unsigned.
These days the palms of her hands throb constantly. She cannot decide if her hands are lonely or simply relieved.
