balloon skin

COHORT 6

I don’t learn how to bathe myself until I am

eleven years old. Before then, my mother scrubs

dead skin off my limbs and presses shampoo into

my scalp before rinsing everything off with cold

water.

Water is never warm enough. I always come

out of the bathroom blue and shivering,

waiting for someone to decide what I can

wear that day.

Growing up, I am malleable. I learn dysfunctional

interactions as I age. My mother teaches me that

hangers against skin feel sharp. I learn that

hedgehogs can eat one-third of their body weights

in just one night.

I begin pressing hair against my mouth. I learn only to touch myself.

She pulls me out of school for

years. At home my brother calls me

crazy. I press hair against my

mouth.

In the sunlight, my hair is a light brown from the chlorine at

the swimming pool. I imagine I am elsewhere, maybe I

become a perfect American girl in this vision: light brown

hair, warm eyes, the kind of narrow face they like.

For the first few years of my life, everything

is sharp. My mother prepares lemon drinks

that burn the back of my throat. A few

people call me “gifted” and I’m made to

believe it until the hangers come again. They

never leave marks.

My mother and I share the same hands; people call them piano fingers. I

hate the piano. It’s less about the force and more about the bone, my cousin

says, when I try punching him. In pictures I can’t tell whose hands are whose.

I aim with my knuckles but my mother never teaches me self-defense. I’m

craving something and I don’t know what.

In vacation pictures, I am frowning, squinting at the

camera. I can still feel my mother pinching my side,

trying to get me to smile. I never post pictures of

our trips because I never look like I’m having a good

time. We always have arms slung around each other,

all fake-casual, my mother stretching a smile across

her face. My dad doesn’t know how to smile and will

never learn. My brother dresses differently so he

doesn’t look poor.

In hotel rooms we use hotel-room-shampoo and in one memory,

I use the word “damn” for the first time when looking for my

conditioner. I wake up with bruises.

When my dad leaves for Seattle I can’t say goodbye because

a typhoon hits Manila before we can make it home. We sit

in the car and watch a fire starting across the street. Soy

sauce softens a plastic bag of rice. My palms sweat,

searching for warm chicken.

Or at least, in this version they’re empty.

In another the sauce is dribbling down

from the corner of my mouth. My brother

borrows my pink raincoat to go to the

bathroom in the church across the street.

This is a time where we trust God, my mom likes to say when

things go bad. At this point I’m still eight, still religious. I

clasp my sweaty hands together and pray. We stay cooped up

together in the car until dawn, taking extra care not to touch.

Over long car rides listening to American novels, I try to tie my hair up.

I learn that hedgehogs anoint themselves whenever they discover

anything new or unusual. They foam at the mouth and coat themselves

in spit. There are so many things I haven’t yet been taught.

These days I am easily startled. At school

my classmates throw things at me to

watch me flinch involuntarily, even if I

know it’s coming. Sometimes I am

reduced to begging until my knees burn

red. I never know where to place myself.

Once, when I am young, I hug my mother and tell her it feels good

because she is thin. She stands still before prying me off her body and

tells me it’s strange. This manufactured distance doesn’t feel right; I

am only following what I’ve been taught. I continue to touch myself

and notice where different parts of my skin stick to each other.

In my family, I am taught that being thin

is a rite of passage, that no boy will want

to touch you. Boys only want girls that

hardly exist, girls with floating arms and

hands at their sides. I imagine all the girls’

organs are dislocated from one another.

Sometimes I imagine my body this way:

translucent, loose flaps of skin against bone.

There are somewhere between 5,000 to 7,000 spines on an average adult

hedgehog.

Maybe in this version I’m sitting in a car in the middle of a typhoon.

Outside of the car, my bones will thaw like snow when it comes into

contact with the floodwater. My parents tell me it is made out of rat piss.

I’m so used to being a doll but I don’t notice at first

because my hair doesn’t feel plasticky.

When my father comes back to Seattle after two months, I have two-

week old bruises yellowing on my right arm. I don’t remember

the weapon of choice or the reason.

Throughout my childhood I master the art of using

just the right amount of pressure on my scalp to test

how big a bruise is.

One day I discover that bruises can merge together. The insides of my

skull feel swollen. I imagine that the tissue is translucent, the

fluorescent lights in the first-floor bathroom melting it all away.

In photos, my eyes are never red. I look it up: lacrimal glands are

supposed to secrete fluid and the blood vessels that service them

are supposed to dilate to supply them. My body fails to secrete, so

my scleras stay clean. I’m always looking for markings. Of what,

I’m not sure.

The dentist tells my mother I’m grinding my teeth to bits in my sleep.

Post-shower skin drapes, soggy: it is never enough.

I learn to hold people properly when I turn twelve.

I’m not sure how long these things are supposed to

last, so I try my best to overcome this learning

curve. In family pictures I practice slinging my arm

around my family members, practice stretching a

smile across my face. In private, I hug myself.

My mother begs me to fix my teeth. I get retainers

that she tightens up with a key at night.

In high school I wonder how transparent I have to become. I

spend many nights glassy-eyed, intestines hollow.

I’m always aching for people

now, everyone but my mother.

Whenever I come home after

spending time away, everything

feels out of place.

These days my skin is clear: partly because of Adapalene gel, partly because

I’m too tall to bruise now. Instead she makes me down lemons, apple cider

vinegar, tonics to burn through my stomach lining. Hopefully after all of this,

nothing of me will be left for boys to eat. No one knows what we want.

I pull back my thighs in the mirror; I have been doing this since the age of

twelve. Before showers, I spend half-hours in front of my bathroom mirror,

examining my body assembled into different forms. I want to make sure

nothing incorrect sticks out, that everything remains folded in like the way

they want bodies to be.

My mother makes me stand on a platform, tells me which parts are left

to crease. She’s a master; she knows she can’t touch me or I’ll scream.

I’ve stopped playing the piano and now, my mother mourns the loss of my

hands. She begs, but it’s never enough.

My teeth aren’t straight the way they’re supposed to be, but

I learn to smile a specific way. Stretched out like that, no

one notices. I spend fifteen minutes in the shower, since

I’ve mastered the art of scrubbing. I try to be slow enough

for someone to see the translucence I’ve achieved. There’s a

bald spot on my head.

My friend tells me about the Hedgehog’s Dilemma. In the winter,

hedgehogs huddle close to each other for warmth, but the only way they

can do this is by hurting the others through their spikes. They decide it’s

better for them to stay apart.