Sometimes I feel the need to peel myself like an orange. To strip myself of skin and society.
It would start with my hair, long and flowing brown, falling away. Its untrimmed tips that scrap frantically at my shoulder blades would dust the floor at my toes. I would look to my feet. First the soles would soften like soil after a rain storm. They would soften until the soil reached my ankles. My ankles would turn to ribbons, yellows and reds, in memory of those whom I love and let build me. These ribbons would wind up my calf, a reverse May Day pole, sway loose at my hips like a skirt. My skin would wind past my stomach taking the years of thoughtless words that often made me feel less than I am. We would part friends at last, my stomach and I. Enemies who have realized the silliness of our war. My skin would slide up my back like a cape then drift away like a loose sheet blown from the clothes line. My wings would sprout, those majestic wings I have so long kept hidden under self consciousness and doubt. The knots in my shoulders would finally be allowed to fray and relax. Last, I would loosen the skin from my skull. This might take a moment as it has been drawn tightly. I follow the line where my hair once parted, straight down the center, with a knife. I take it off like the bald cap for a costume, slowly and from the back. As the skin rolls away I feel my cerebellum expand and grow. All the emotions I feared to feel I will feel. The anger and sadness at all that life can be and the relief and joy for all that life may be. The left and right hemispheres do the same in turn. They lounge on their respective sides in their respective ways, so different yet the same. My temporal lobe thrums with the new vibrations. All the information I have learned comes in new, fresh, without bias. At the end of this journey is my frontal lobe. As the skin comes away it sees me, sees us, and we are one. It looks to the present and future and realizes we are infinite. We go on forever as one shinning mass. We are the stars, the wind, the heavens and the earth. We are amazing. We are beautiful. We are whole.