Year-Bare Skin — A Short Story

I’m dying inside a little more each day. Nobody sees the years in me flaking and peeling off like dead skin from my body. But I’m crumbling. These days I even have to be careful of the wind or I might lose a decade. 

     I clutch my sleeves, holding a few years from stumbling out. There’s a sinking feeling in my chest, a bubble, a pop, as if a possible future is spilling into dust. Once a glorious possibility, now a heap of ashes. I feel it. 

     It feels like I’m losing a corner of my heart every time a piece of my future loosens and shatters before me. So many memories of what could’ve been splash like scattered shards at my feet. Maybe my heart is receding within me, chiseled more and more with every lost fraction. I wish I could feel my heart, feel the blood pounding through my body like a war drum. Because I wish it was a war inside me instead of the dull surrender that I know is true. 

     I wonder how it will end. Will I melt? Will I seize my chest and fall dramatically to the ground, shooting a last look at my inexistent lover with the words “I wanted to tell you…” stumbling off my lips? Will I collapse with blood spurting from my nose? Will I set ablaze without explanation? Will the earth open and swallow me up? I hope it’s something sensational. Something memorable. 

     I yell at street corners now when I’m not huddled indoors clinging to survival. They think I’m a madman. I probably am. I yell at them that life is short, that they are smaller than they think, that there is only meaning in living as far as one’s neighbors determine. I ask for years. I ask for pain. I ask for tears and for joy. I put out my tattered collection hat, wondering how many memories I’ll gather in it today. “Give me a smile, give me a frown, I’ll take the scraps of your day. Just give me something, sirs and ladies,” I plead. 

     One man pities me enough to offer me his Yesterday. It was a story. My hat catches it and I listen to it, my fingers trembling on the corner of the hat as I lift it up to my ear. It is hatred and melancholy. Blood and lust and anger and tears drip from its words. “I’ll take it,” I thought. “It’s something.” 

     The story then surges in my chest and my limbs recover some strength, but so does the indomitable urge to destroy and weep and take. I almost feel a heartbeat. 

     I want to feel before my last day. A full and strong feeling. Before my eyes lock shut and my skin freezes over, before I fall over stiff as a board in the middle of the street, and before I’m discarded and walked over as if I’m a tossed cigarette half-burning in the asphalt, I want to feel a single pulse of the world flowing through me. Just one beat of the universe in my meaningless heart, if for one moment I can know what it is to live before I know what it is to die. Then again, maybe that is what dying is — the unmistakable knowledge that you were, in fact, alive that whole while. 

     The next few days I resolve to gather more stories. Once it is discovered that I accept the debris and the refuse of people’s Yesterdays, they dump and discard and shake out their sufferings like loose change from their pockets. I collect. Complaints, gossip, tales of misery and miserably told tales, greed, discontentment, hate, covetousness, I collect them. All of them. Murder, death, dark magic, disasters, accidents, tragedies, heartache, pain, the world splinters open to me and lets me stick my hand inside. 

     The stories splash and tear and whip and toss and sink and scream and mangle and rip and dash my heart against the stone of my ribs, a dark sea raging there. I hold it all inside, clutching my chest to bar it from releasing. 

     Then: a heartbeat. 

     Then another. 

     In those moments, I wanted to destroy the world. I wanted to have my hands on everything, I wanted to own it, to touch it, to know it. Life fluttered in my veins, if by life one can refer to the phantom sensation of understanding that one is alive as they die. Years shrank back from my skin, peeling more quickly than ever. I shook with rage, alive, alive, alive. So many stories within me made me weep that I was convulsing with anger and sadness and confusion. “Feel something, anything,” I cried. And I felt everything.

     In a rush, the world passed through me like a ghost — a flash of symptoms dispersing through my body. I watched the people walking by me, unknowing, unfeeling. “Don’t they know? Don’t they know…” I mouthed, knowing, feeling. Then, I shed my last year, the strain too much for my year-bare skin. 

     And for a brief moment, I was alive.