Words: Kitty Rose (she/her)
Sometimes you have to be brave when you touch your face. Like when you turn your light off as a kid and run run run to your bed before the big, bad, scary monsters catch you. You have to touch your face – it’s your own skin, after all. You shouldn’t be scared of it. But oh boy, it’s 11:38 pm and you need to get ready for bed – you have work tomorrow you have to get up in six hours – you always leave this so last minute – you idiot.
When you wash your face, you can feel dents and bumps and dips and crevices, little and big. You can feel their open slimy sticky protruding ooziness as they grow and grow, pulsating and winking like little googly eyes stuck on you. Miniature wounds of pus and blood and clear liquid, wanting to be popped like a kid does with bubble wrap.
How liquid are you?
They tease you because they know you can’t harm them. You’re not supposed to but you want them gone. You can’t even see this happening, but you can feel them. You just know they’re there. You always know they’re there. Your redness glows. You can feel it radiating from inside of you. It is warm and pink and salmony and mottled and dark and light, all at once, everywhere.
Wet your face. Put a little drop of cleanser in your palms, rub rub rub them together, go go go. Scrub scrub scrub, but you never really feel clean, no matter how hard you try. You can still feel it all underneath the soapy suds and lukewarm water, which runs beige into the cracked white enamel sink. You have to put moisturiser on after you’ve patted your face dry, and go through this all over again, rub rub rub. Avoid the mirror, don’t look (DON’T look). You hate the big light. God. You really, really, really hate the big light.
I think (I know) you’re scared because when you touch your face, you’re reminded of all the times your fingertips felt something different.
But even then, you were never one of those girls. Those girls who had soft, downy hair, sparse and golden. Hair that when the sun shone on their arms, the light caught its transparency and showed you what femininity was. Instead, from an early age, your hair was always dark, coarse, prickly, in the places people said it wasn’t supposed to be. Every week, you went to swimming lessons, and in those condensation-beaded, chlorine-perfumed, veruca-plastered changing rooms, something you once loved became a spectacle of how your body was different to everyone else’s. As you shimmied on your swimming costume as slowly as you could, your broad shoulders, knobbly knees, purple bruises, eczema, pale skin, wonky toes, and spots on your shoulders that started there and kept on coming, glowed grossly underneath the fluorescent lights of the pool.
So you started lying to your mum each week, telling her that you’re on your period and can’t swim. She got the message after a few months – she thought you just couldn’t be bothered. But you used to love swimming. You love the sea, the water. As you swim laps and count each one in French un deux trois, it’s the only time and place where your brain is quiet. But now swimming (your body) has become embarrassing, shameful, painful. You said goodbye to girlhood the moment the thing you once used to escape became the very thing you wanted to escape from.
Your swimming costume straps dug into your shoulders and left red angry marks, imprinting its shape onto your skin as you grew more and more each week, much faster than other people in your year, faster faster faster. Your clothes couldn’t keep up with your body, as it galloped ahead without you like a wild horse. Its dark silhouette became a far off speck in the distance, swallowed up into a heat-swollen horizon.
But I’m catching up to my body. I’m running after it, and I’m going to jump on it when I finally manage to catch up, the two of us side by side. Now the speck is beginning to look like a black blob; maybe soon I’ll be close enough to just about trace its shape.
I’m learning to love this new body. And I’m going to catch that horse. But, I am painfully aware that even when I do, I’ll fall off sometimes. When I struggle with a pair of jeans in a dressing room; if I have kids one day; or when I wash my face and feel another pimple forming. But I’ll get back up. I’ll brush myself off, and clamber back onto that horse, who’s not quite as wild as she once was before.
