Two Eight Three: Skin

I have been thinking today about going down to the pool. It's a perfect day for it: cool, slightly breezy, sunlit.  Summer is almost here, and we'll have  soul-killing heat and humidity until some time in October. I should be taking advantage of the afternoon. Yet I can't bring myself to do that. In a better world, I could talk with certain girls--- Liberty, say, or my New Zealand friend, or the girl in Asheville ---and explain why body fear has set in. There's no one here to ask for support or advice, alas.

I could begin by noting that after six weeks of lockdown for the Red Death, so many people are worried about I've heard called having acquired a "Coronavirus 15"--- extra pounds put on by inactivity and stress eating. There's very much that.  That does make me a bit shy about going into the pool.

Yet it's not so much that. It's not fear of a few extra pounds. It's fear of being mocked or questioned about the body piercings I have. I can laugh and say that, well, it's not like the current governor of New York isn't supposed to have the same things (and Bella Hadid certainly has them). I was in the pool the last few summers and never felt any body fear or body shame like this.  I can't bring myself to be anywhere where I might be mocked or questioned about my piercings.  And I've lost track (or control of) what messages the piercings might send to any of the bikini girls who do frequent the pool.

My lovely blonde friend down in New Zealand always told me that when she'd borrow her family's beach house for a long weekend (sometimes for a week) she'd pull her BMW into the garage and start undressing as she went into the house. She told me once that her shoes would never make it past the door and wouldn't be needed again until she was on her way back to her own house in Wellington. The beach house had an in-ground pool, and she told me that wearing a swimsuit in her own private pool was simply not something that was ever going to happen. She did the same, she said, whenever she borrowed her (divorced) father's house on the South Island, too. Swim naked, sunbathe naked, read naked on the patio. She used to tell me that in a week at either place, she'd be barefoot the entire time, always sleep naked, and that the only thing she'd be likely to wear would be a faded old denim shirt or a cotton pullover sweater when cooking or in case there was a cool wind in off the Tasman Sea or Marlborough Sounds.

Liberty was the same way. On weekends when she and I would rent an AirBnB house on the coast or on a mountain lake in the Carolinas, she'd wear (if anything) just one of my shirts or one of the lightweight cotton sweaters she habitually pilfered from my closet. Her goal, she told me once, was just to be naked in sunlight--- she always talked about doing that one day on the Gold Coast in Australia or on an island in the Caribbean, just being naked for a whole summer, swimming and snorkeling and turning darker and darker.  She said that by the time she was in her mid-teens, she found herself unable to get to sleep if she was wearing anything. She felt, she said, absolutely secure and powerful and alive when she was naked in sunlight or in the water.

That's an attitude of course that I can admire and be excited by, but it's never something I could adopt or emulate. I can look down to the pool this afternoon--- the pool is empty right now ---and imagine that the water would be perfect. But there's no way at all that I could go down myself right now.

I can't imagine feeling sunlight on skin, and I certainly can't imagine ever having my body seen any longer. I'd absolutely be too ashamed and fearful to have anyone close enough to see my flesh up close, let alone taste or smell or touch it.