A Skin Too Few

The title comes from a beautifully melancholic documentary about Nick Drake that I watched recently. It's something his sister said of him and his inability to cope with the everyday every day. The phrase has been rattling around my heid like a two-bob bit in an auld tin can this past wee while since my own skin has slowly deteriorated.

When my skin reaches critical mass I really feel I've a skin too few. My fingers are banditos that brutally raid and pillage the terrain of my epidermis. They work in two gangs tearing my skin apart. "You  love it !" they salivate, " it feels so good this violent thing we do." And it does until they ride off placated to my sides and I'm left stunned, washed out with plenty of nippy sair yins across the terrain.

And my eyes. They get a real doing. The banditos really love the orgasmic slurpy ferocity of getting wired right in to my eyes.

There I am, swollen, spent and sparked out on the sofa. It takes so much energy out of me. Muscle energy. Healing energy. Psychic energy.

You do it to yourself / you do / and that's what really hurts sang Radiohead.

And it's true. I do, and it leaves me with a skin too few.
Not just physically, but psychologically. It leaves me the Walking Wasted, hyper sensitive to how others are looking at me. To any wee blotch or scab or blemish. Any mirror, or reflective surface, gets a doing when I'm off out with a skin too few. I'm looking for where my shameful weaknesses reddens like a rosette, where the bruises and burns of my own doing show me up. I know everyone can see the pathetic creature I am. Who would want to know me? Who ... you see what I do, when I've a skin too few?
It's all internal, this inferno. The cracks in my skin, the emotional cracks are erupting fissures in my sense of who I am. Through it glubs molten dark, apocaplyptic mortality burning with its sulphur stench. It incinerates everything around, I'm unable to see around through the acrid smoke never mind see clearly. I can't see through, with a skin too few.

Yet it heals. A wonder to me is when I've torn myself into a proper horror show and the skin heals itself. It seems so damaged as to be impossible to ever return to some kind of human form. Yet it does. As do I. Another skin grows and I'm back wearing the mantle of me, myself.

So today I had an emergency Drs appointment and got prescribed the little lot in the photo. Thankfully we don't pay for prescriptions in Scotland! And I'll get started with pills and potions and lotions and puffs and oils. A skin too few the now, but hopeful for healing.

Onwards.