Dear Skin,
Despite our closeness, we seem to disagree often, you and I.
I think I am good to you—I try to be good to you—but you seem to respond to my efforts with nothing but ire. Either that, or we disagree on what you should be. I say that you'd look best as a lake on a windless day—calm, cool, reflective. You seem to think that you're more becoming in a bolder form: red, craggy, dry as the sand dunes we crouched behind two summers ago.
You've refused to budge through torture and treatment by both professional and amateur alike. No amount of coaxing and cajoling, no method of persuasion has convinced you to be anything else than what you are: deep brown, acne-prone, spotty, scar-covered. Sometimes I think you're punishing me.
Other times, I look at the scar on my ankle and remember the sunny bike ride that produced it. In those rare moments, I think about the sheer amount you and I have accomplished together. We've spoken at conferences and taken the SAT and moved across the country from everyone we love. We've taken tests and gone on runs and eaten and danced. We have grown (considerably) together, and throughout all that growth you have stretched to fit me—a feat not even my most expensive shirt could hope to match—and done it, for the most part, gracefully. You have mended yourself when I have torn you, leaving little but a dark seam reminding not to be so careless again. You stretched with my childish indulgence and have shrunken in the self-discipline of my adulthood.
At this moment, I thank you for all these years of sticking with me. I thank you for every time that I, like a sunflower, have turned my face towards the sun and remembered that you—flawed as you may be—are mine.
