This is just gross.

The sunburn on my back has started peeling.  This, in itself, is not very interesting, nor is it even really news – I just spent nine days in the Caribbean, of course I have a sunburn and of course it’s starting to peel.

Swear to God, though, I’m gonna sprain something important trying to peel that dead skin from my back.

If Elle ever gives up on me and trades me in for a better model, it will be for a man that doesn’t pull, peel, and pick at himself.  I peel scabs, I pick at my lips when they’re dry, I scratch at stuff and pop zits and on and on.  Elle will very gently, and with either a small smile or a wide-eyed glance of exasperated admonishment, take my hand and remove it from my savaged cuticle, for instance, or the scab on my shin from when I crashed the laundry cart (don’t ask).

The way I see it, scabs are the toys given us by Mother Nature, to play with while our wounds heal.  In the Kauffman household, I’m pretty much alone in this world view.  The majority view (there’s only two of us, but I think Elle has managed to get two votes to my one) is that wounds must be left alone to heal.  She’s right, of course – case in point, my gum surgery of two weeks ago – but I still think it’s worth having a few interesting scars, if the payoff is getting to fidget with my dings and scrapes as they heal.  Elle says, at the rate I’m going, my body will be a curdled twist of scar tissue by the time I’m fifty.  Against my scar-molesting nature, I agree that would be slightly gross.

Already, post-honeymoon, my body is a playground of temptation, a battle-damaged garden of Eden.  The forbidden fruit includes a healthy handful of mosquito and sandfly bites, the scuff marks from beach volleyball, and a whole phalanx of itchy plant-rash blisters that I’m dying to scratch.  It’s only for love of Elle that I’m not raking myself to ribbons with my fingernails, but I’m mostly managing to keep my hands to myself.

Put a peeling sunburn in the middle of my back, though, and then you can put a hidden camera on me and sit back.  I’m YouTube-worthy.  I bend side to side, reaching first one hand and then the other behind my back trying to reach the tantalizingly out-of-reach edges of my skin.  You might catch me sitting on the bathroom sink, craning my neck around as I try to follow my scrabbling fingertips in the mirror.  Grunting and moaning, because my shoulders and neck ache from all the straining and stretching, and then sighing in disappointment when the stuff I peel loose doesn’t slough off in ribbons.  There’s no point in being a masochist if you can’t be a high-volume masochist.

Some morning, Elle will come into the bathroom and find me paralyzed.  My head will be twisted 180 degrees like an owl, both my arms will be dislocated from hyperextension, my fingertips will be blue from lack of circulation, and my back will be a crisscrossed map of fingernail tracks.  But around me will be an ankle-high mound of beautifully and seamlessly peeled sunburn-skin, and my face will be fixed in a serene smile of accomplishment.  I’m still not sure whether Elle will laugh out loud or do a full body creeped-out tremor fit, just prior to calling 911 to fix my broken and brainless self.

~ by joshkauffman on July 10, 2009.