TexasGirl Photography

My skin is mine alone, and yours is yours alone – I 

can see it, but I can’t know it, not the way you know it. 

A little layer to keep our secrets in, hidden under a 

peel so precarious we often keep it concealed.  It’s

nice when we share these secrets with each other,

nice because otherwise nobody would ever know them.

Walk a mile in my shoes and you’ll feel the imprint my

size and weight left there, but those shoes won’t tell you

a thing if you don’t ask.  So let’s do it, let’s take turns,

with the asking.

This is my skin.  I sit in it – the I that I am underneath,

that may or may not be beautiful, but it shines.  They 

say it turns over every seven years, so I’ve been 

perched in this packaging for six generations plus a 

couple (now, two).  Revolving on the spit, day in day

out.  You can see how some of the creases have

become permanent folds; I can’t straighten my arms

enough to iron them out.  Can’t unwrinkle my brow.

Every night I sleep in my skin, and sometimes I transform

bursting out of the chrysalis of dreams into the new 

reality of the night, where shadows move and dreamers

murmur to each other as they pass in the hallways of

somnolence.  When I wake the morning sun has dried

my new shell, and in the drying it shrank back into its

place around my bones.  This fragile cradle that I walk

around in, reborn, in secret, to fly through another day.

This year’s installment of random self portraits, in honor of another year of life! All are film, in 35mm, 120, and 5×7.