Pieces of Me
I was driving down the wet rainy street just now when the little disc of dead skin fell off my cheek and landed in my lap. It was like an alien thing, this round wafer of cells, another piece of my childhood that surfaced on my face after all these years.
It’s strange how all these things from my childhood are coming off of my face. I haven’t really been tripping on it too hard, but I think at an unconscious level, the things that have been happening to the outside of my body are changing the inside of me. When I was first diagnosed with the skin cancer on my nose and told that it was sun damage from I was a kid, I got really emotionally fucked up over it. I remembered all those summers on Lake Berryessa, floating around on an inner-tube while my nose fried in the sun and my mom, dad, uncles and aunts got drunk on canned beer. I actually have a bodily memory on the very spot where the cancer developed. I can remember the blistering pieces of skin crusting up and peeling off. I can feel them right now even when they’re not there.
I couldn’t help but see my skin cancer as a metaphor, as the poison from my childhood that was never going away. The day the doctor’s office called and told me it was cancer, I cried and cried, not because it was cancer (not the bad kind) but because it just seemed that I would never escape the shit from my childhood.
Once I recovered from the initial blow of the whole cancer thing, that kind of irrational metaphorical thinking diminished, but still ever since I went through the ordeal, I’ve been different, somehow much more connected to my whole self and also much more protective of myself. I’ve always written about my childhood, and by doing that I make it not mine. I don’t have to own it any more. I can remove it from myself by making it into a construction of words, a fiction, an object. So when the cancer came up on my nose, suddenly my childhood was literally surfacing as a cancer on my body. This freaked me out a bit.
Last week I had to go to the dentist to replace a giant filling in one of my molars. The only reason the filling needed to be replaced is because I had a cavity underneath it. But the filling itself was solid as can be. As the dentist was chiseling away at the giant hunk of silver in my mouth, he said, “This filling has served you well, Kim. You’ve probably had it since you were a teenager. You must have taken good care of your teeth when you were in your teens and twenties.”
I laughed and said, “Oh no. As a matter of fact I did not take good care of anything about me in my teens and my twenties.” Then I thought about it, and I realized that the last time I went to the dentist when I was a kid was probably when I was eleven years old, so that’s probably when I got that filling that my dentist took out of my mouth last week. That would mean that filling is 36 years old. So strange to sit in the dentist chair and think that this piece of my childhood was being pulled out of my mouth. I have so few things from my childhood that I actually felt sad to see the filling go. But damn, that cavity hurt. So the dentist pulled out the filling, found the decay, drilled it out, and now my giant hunk of childhood silver is gone.
So today, the disc of pre-cancer dead cells fell off my cheek. I looked in the mirror and saw the tender new cancer-free pink skin that surfaced from below the bad skin. I realized that is me right now. This tender pink exposed skin. In fact, this has been me since July really. New, tender, raw, exposed. I realized that one of the reasons I’ve been so quiet is because when you lose pieces of yourself, especially when those pieces are the physical embodiment of your childhood, it can change things inside you. I am changed, and I’m still trying to put the pieces of me back together to see what I’ll be when I’m done processing the change. I think that’s why I’ve been so quiet.
Anyway, I’m going to go put some cover-up makeup on that pink spot on my cheek. I don’t feel like having it exposed right now. I’m hoping that when that little round circle of dead cells fell of my cheek this afternoon that finally the strange invisible weight that I’ve been carrying for these past few months got lighter. I don't know. Maybe I needed to shed those poisonous parts of myself, so I can find the part of me that is new and not poisoned. I do suddenly feel better somehow.