Sensitive

In the evening around the dinner table, when you tell me I am too sensitive, the skins between the folds of my neck buzz and vibrate until they peel free. We watch them fly away on flaky, eczematic wings. You were just being honest. Someone had to admit the eggplant parmesan I’d made especially for you was too bland to be edible. 

A few liberated skin flakes dash for the string of LEDs above the countertops where they settle along the lights, content to crawl around the wires until they dissolve into husks of dust. While you order takeout, I crack open the window and a couple pieces of my skin escape into the pollen-swollen air. I call them butterflies, these creatures that subsist along my body in a larval stage until they metamorphosize into beings of the sky. You call them mosquitoes.

“Disgusting,” you say when you find three skins crawling along our counters. They like the ravines between the porcelain tiles—the grout lines only a hair or two wider than their bodies, as if the surface were a grid of purpose-made streets for their traversal. You wipe them up with a wet sponge and show me their corpses. “They kinda look like you if you squint.”

I don’t need to squint to see that my body is a conglomeration of their bodies. Their miniscule forms compress together, always squirming. Holding in my muscles and blood. 

You laugh and, when I frown, you kiss me on the forehead and remind me how to take a joke. You do not see the larvae around my cuticles grow wings and take the deceased’s places.

I slather myself three times a day in lotions recommended by dermatologists and internet videos. The oils grease over emergent wings, dulling their buzzing that used to keep you up at night. The slickened skin-flake legs tumble on the surface of my body. Even when they find a purchase and wander along our bedsheets, you are so patient with me as you pluck them off the side of your bed.

“No one will ever love you the way I do,” you whisper and kiss the vibrating crease between my eyebrows. Though your words are kind, I feel the pull of the larvae along my back threatening to break off. Before you can notice, I scald myself in a hot shower, scraping away all my errant skins and sending them flightless down the drain. I reapply my lotions.

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I did try to leave, once. It was a summer day—hot and dry, the way I used to love them when I was younger. These days the sun burns through the fragile larvae and my own perspiration fails to cool their heat-shriveled bodies. 

I waited on the driveway for my brother, leaning against a suitcase of loose clothing and hand creams. It was an impulse choice to phone him, and I couldn’t say if the skins under my ears trembled in fear or anticipation.

You showed up instead.

I thought you would be angry when you recounted my brother’s call—how he’d told you I was an idiot, leaving the only person who’d put up with me. But you never raised your voice. You sat me down and unpacked my suitcase while I pressed a sweating glass of water against my arm to soothe my skin’s incessant humming.

You reminded me that all those bottles of lotion I had thought to steal away were yours, actually. You bought them. My little job and my little community college degree couldn’t afford my fancy skincare routine. “You’re lucky I love you,” you said, as entire sheaths of my skin broke free on butterfly wings.

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The longer I stay with you, the more of me turns windborne. Pieces of me burrow inside the cupboards and along the baseboards, rooting themselves inside our home. I daydream of them returning, nestling back into the larvae of my skin, the layers of their wings stretching protectively over my raw scars. They never do. There is more of me crawling around the dark recesses of this house than along my own body.

Sometimes, while you’re still sleeping, I step out onto our terrace to water my small bed of pansies. You call those flowers proof that everything I touch dies. But they aren’t dead, only choosing for themselves the right time to emerge from their buds. 

I crouch down to the reluctant blooms and see one of my skin’s lost butterflies sunbathing on the leaves. Clumps of pollen stick to its legs. I set my hand beside it, and it climbs onto my finger, gently stepping around the larvae in its path. It opens its wings and they spread ever larger: a single flake of skin unleashed into the world and grown into its own exquisite being. Then it lifts into the sky.