Written after having the need to apply lotion to my eczema-ridden, chapped hands.
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There are days I look at myself and wonder who I could’ve been. If no one had touched me, no one had crawled beneath my skin before I even knew it was mine. If softness had been something I was allowed to grow into, instead of something I was forced to abandon for survival. I think I would have been tender. Maybe even beautiful. Not in the way the media describes it, in the quiet way girls and women sometimes are, when no one has ever taught them to be afraid of their own skin.
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I used to believe softness was something you’re either born with or without. But now I think it’s something you’re either allowed to keep, or forced to burn. I feel like I burned mine. I grew a shell where there should have been skin. My eczema testified for the pressure when I was 4.
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There is a kind of girlhood I never got to live. And yes, I am using the forbidden word. Girlhood. The delicate one, the pink one. The one where beauty feels safe, and not like a spotlight for harm. Instead, I grew up feeling like my body was already used. Like something rancid had seeped into the soil of me, making me barren. Every time I tried to picture myself as beautiful, it felt like straight up lying.
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Now, I do small things. I apply lotion to my hands like I’m trying to say sorry to my chapped hands. I comb conditioner through my hair like maybe if I’m gentle enough, it’ll remember what it’s like to belong to a normal woman. These rituals are unfamiliar. They don’t come to me naturally. But I cherish them the way I imagine someone cherishes a rescued animal: foreign yet trying to trust.
Because somewhere deep down, I still ache to be soft. And maybe that ache is proof that I was never meant to be hard in the first place.
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Missing my girl self, I cried, then we danced.
