Something happened to my skin, back in the fall - suddenly my hands were cracked and itching - an allergy? These days my hands are gouged and bloody and I'm just used to it now, I barely notice.

And then it spread to my face...it's been months now. At first my cheekbones and then later the skin all around my eyelids and eyes, burning and peeling and cracking. It comes and goes and I can't figure it out. It briefly abated last week and I looked at myself in the mirror with wonder and hope like I had emerged from a chrysalis but then it came back with a vengeance two days later so that i was wandering the office with ice pressed to my face as my eyelids swelled with hives and i rubbed at the edges of my forehead and cheeks with the backs of my hands, trying to alleviate the itch but not leave any scars. Some days I look down and see the flakes from my face strewn across my desk or my pillow. I am so hideous. I can't tell if I really do not care or if this is just the thing I do now with grief, pretending to accept things I don't understand and cannot control.

Someone asked me if i was internalizing stress and I laughed, then caught the bitterness in my laugh. But actually this new normal is relatively free of conflict and that's really nice. And while there are bad lonely days, I have many good days, when I think: i am here and this is real and i am happy.

But then there's this other thing that I took for granted before and now I can't find. Before, I cared about my body. I felt attractive, I was attractive. I desired and I was desired. All of that bottled up now and put away in a place i can't find. I look at people. I imagine our bodies touching. Nothing sparks. I bike. I run. My body doesn't feel like my body anymore.

I went to Ottawa to see my sister and I slathered myself with Vaseline and hydrocortisone and then we floated in a hot tub in a fancy quebecois spa on the edge of the national park in a snow squall. I lay on a heated stone bed and sat in various steam rooms and saunas and tried to reconnect my heart to my mind to my body - my scaly face and hands, my eyes like tortoise eyes - wrinkled and shedding and somehow aged. I took deep breaths from my softened middle. I tried to reconcile myself to myself. To just be there together.

One of the spa workers did some kind of master spa dance to a soundtrack of the very worst and most distracting inspirational music. The room was heated to a point that was almost unbearable, and he swirled towels through the air over glowing orange coals, sending waves of pine-scented heat over our bodies. I felt a whisper of sensation up my spine. Familiar, like a hand brushing the hollow below my collarbone, like a kiss behind my ear. Afterwards, heat radiating from my body, I tiptoed barefoot across the ice and plunged into the freezing cold pool and felt my heart contract in shock, skip a beat, and then adjust.

11:06 a.m. - 2019-02-18