Your Skin

La columna de tu espalda.

When I’s a baby, my mama says, I’s a feverish baby. Collicky. Wouldn’t shut up, the day or the night. I made an early career of fucking up everyone else’s career, and a good night’s sleep. I suffered for the nipple and the coaxing hand. Separation anxiety ruled and I made a great deal of the need for the flesh.
Not to sound dirty here, but I could make the life of a woman completely unbearable before I even had a memory, or a consciousness of what a woman outside of my family may or may not need – or one inside of my family for that matter.
At twelve years, i took up the camera, developed a fascination for the photographic. I adored the way in which, even now, your skin, could be yours, or it could be the Sierra-Nevada mountain range. I took multiple photos of my inner, hairless thigh. With the right lighting, the right crop, the right artisitic eye, your body would be the whole world. But all of this of course, happened long before the age of twelve, and so it means nothing of the one who stands here now.
There was nothing of the way you stand there, but only of the way in which you were there standing beyond and distant from the viewfinder. Everything could be, and was best if it was, seen as something other than what it was. I love it all. Your back as Nags Head’s dunes was my favorite. I travelled, but should’ve travelled more.
But I have grown. I take pictures still. Mostly at 30 frames/second. More to see of you but less to interpret. I walk silkenly stars in a grotesque mass of information overload. Your back is your back now.
I put it all down tonight. I put down the foreign capture device. The lens and the distance. The hour and a half in dark room with me and a memory of the way it all went down. The way in which apparently I cannot deal with that which is real. Life seems to happen on the other side of a lens. Or at least on the other side of someone’s lens. I want to make amends, or love, or peace, or something like that.
Sensory organs grow from the end of my arms, I find. The way in which I used to read topographic maps, I read the back of a woman tonight. And not just any one, but rather, one that I had wondered about the way in wich she twitches and turns. The way she may turn to say, “I love you.”
And in a way, it’s Frida, and “La columna de mi espalda”. Around number twleve you have experienced a fracture and a disk protruding. I felt it with my own hands and it wrote into my encumbered mind an image of what exactly it is going on inside of you. I made memory with touch that becomes photographic and forever. I render prison keys with nothing but my head.
Three and one half inches up your spine on your right is a mole of indeterminate size and I think it is on that that you should blame all of the problems. I saw it not with the viewfinder, or with my own eyes, but with my hand as it glided across to comfort, and perhaps to woo. I know it is there, just as your other protrusion further down is.
My hands are helicopters twirling as whirlybirds are wont to over the back of something such as this, or the spine of the Appalachian mountains. I make it all up you now. There is no way that this happened. My fingers have memories that my head cannot possibly account for.
I remember the way your skin felt under my fingers better than I remember the way it posssibly could have looked before my eyes. I lay my lens aside and consider the landscape. The way the mountains look this time of the year in a frost brought on at the end of spring.