I’ve been fascinated with the oval-shaped burn on my torso. First, a scab. Slowly, likely, a scar.

It happened on October 11. I accidentally scorched my skin with a baking pan while heating up everything-flavored Brazi Bites while wearing a black midriff-exposing crop top and low rise while having a snack before getting dressed to attend the New York Emmy® Awards.

At first, it was nothing. A little bit of red, tucked under the black Instagram-ad purchased shapewear I wore under the black Nicole Miller dress I’ve had since 2003. Then it blistered—the burn—and bubbled into a two-quarter-sized site of wide-open wet skinless juice. Then slowly—very slowly—a scab began to form. Starting at the edges. Then slowly—very, very slowly—rippling its way to eventually meet in the middle of the burn, working towards a complete scab.

After a week, it hadn’t done that yet, make something complete.

After a week and a day, it was still millimeter-ing its way to some semblance of connection with itself. During those days of healing, after a shower, the budding scab would turn into mush.

Mush. And then try again to harden. Heal.

I tried to work with it, the scab. Listen to it. Responsively support the healing that it needed. Did my best to balance a variety of methods like applying healing ointments, or treatments to prevent infection, or Band-Aids, or a combination of all three. I also tried letting it get some air by going raw dog with neither Band-Aid nor ointment at all.

Watching the scab harden slowly—very, very slowly—was particularly captivating to me. It felt impossible not to see it as a metaphor for the collective. Our planet. World. How perhaps we might and can and hopefully will heal. And also my own life. My own micro planet, world.

I kept asking myself, then: Are we looking for a scab? Am I looking for a scab? And if so, are we—am I—looking for a scab that will then heal into new skin?

And will it leave a scar? And if it leaves a scar, how will it change my skin? Or ours, as a world.

I have a lot of scars. They leave a lot of messages for me. They’ve become part of the map and topography and ecosystem that is my body and skin. I am forever fascinated by what scars. What disappears completely. What scars but then still fades over time.

For instance, there are the parallel lines on I carved into my left upper thigh when I skipped Latin class in 10th grade after having a panic attack in the wake of a series of traumatic events. There is the thick, brown curving line that looks a little like a question mark on my right forearm from a year ago after accidentally burning my arm while cooking. There are little ticks across my legs from shaving. All accidents. I never used a shaving razor to make any of my carves. There are the two pale nicks that look like sewing stitches on my left wrist from the surgery in college. But the lines I carved into my left forearm in middle school—nowhere to be found. Or the burn on my torso from when I accidentally hit my stomach with a kettle while wearing a baggy t-shirt in the early months of the pandemic? Not sure where it went. It was so loud for so long. Like the pandemic itself. I don’t remember it having the same kind of scabbing journey as this new torso burn. Which is—of course—a reminder, that all skin injuries are not the same.

But skin is resilient. Skin is this massive organ that holds together the vessels that allow us to navigate the earth.

And yet we do not treat each other’s skin—and sometimes our own—with the same kind of resilience. Certainly, that is not how we treat our planet, were we to call the earth a skin too. If anything, we take advantage of its resilience. We ask too often for it to heal too many scabs.

A few weeks after the burn, after 36 hours in Chicago and 10 days in Los Angeles, when I land back home in New York City at JFK, I feel like I want to crawl out of my skin. That’s just how I feel. I am tired. Exhausted. On the edge of being burnt out. My scab is now a scar. Or likely will be—most likely. Right now it is a pink and red oval, visible when I raise my arms.

Perhaps I am becoming a butterfly. Perhaps it is not that I am losing my semblance of self as it feels as I want to skin-crawl, but instead, losing a layer of myself that I no longer need

I can’t tell what is trying to get out. Shed. Scale itself. Heal. I want to weep, but my chest won’t budge. The call is coming from inside the house, but I can’t tell what room.

I text an astrologer friend. “Is a planet on its bullshit today?” I tell her what I’ve said in my head a dozen times since landing: skin; crawl; I want out.

My friend says it’s not necessarily my natal chart. Or planets on their bullshit. I mean there’s something happening that’s definitely something, but not acutely right now. At this particular moment. As I stand at the baggage carousel waiting for my olive-green bag.

My nervous system is fried, she suggests in the voice memo she sends. Which is absolutely true.

But there’s still some kind of chrysalis.

I feel like I’m shedding. Releasing the scab. The scab itself scabbing into metamorphosed skin.

***

I don’t know what day the scab that was originally forming only around the edges of the burn eventually touched itself. I was monitoring it daily. All the time. It seemed like one day it was trying desperately to scab and then one day, after the middle never met, it was en route to scar.

I wonder if that’s what transformation feels like. One day I want to crawl out of my skin. Then one day I simply do. And I don’t know what happens between the chrysalis and the flying, but it happens. One day this burn became a flat new version of skin. Albeit topographically vacant.

Just present. On my torso. A pink two-quarter-sized oval that inhabits my life.

Like the scars before it, I don’t know what it will become. Like the scars before it, I feel frustrated by the lack of control I have over what happens to it. And that I didn’t set out to transform the original make up of my skin into something else that now might be permanent.

That, I think, is my wrestle of late. The stakes both of and for transformation feel colossal. I feel that both for the world and for my own life. And yet, I am starting to accept that I may not be able to fully witness, or even fully embody the exact moment of transformation. I can’t quite manage to calculate the math. I want to make it translating, and able to reproduce. But I suppose that that’s the danger of capitalism. The assumption that every scab or scar is the same. Or that even the journey within the ecosystem from scab to scar might be replicable. It never is. Each chrysalis, each transformation, even if monitored by and with similar stages, is always unique.

***

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