Week 3 - “Skinwalker”
The thing wearing your skin never speaks to you. At night, it lurks by your bedside, watching you with its ascetic gaze. Waiting ever so patiently.
You never refuse when it decides to crawl forward; as it sinks deep beneath your skin, your innards, settling and coiling there. You’ve grown accustomed to its presence. In fact, you believe it’s protecting you, like the good host it is.
During the day, it takes you through your rituals. It sits alongside your work meetings, your grad-school projects, those meandering conversations with that one person who never quite gets the hint. It wishes your loved ones ‘goodnight’ or ‘happy birthday’. It makes you eat, and drink, and sleep like the good host you are.
Perhaps there was a time when you may have objected to the thing. When its force was suffocating and barbed, slogging like mercury through your veins. But now you can’t seem to remember what it was like before. You don’t want to be without it; you’re not sure who you are without it.
Soon, it takes your name for its own. You don’t protest. It was never yours to begin with after all. You let it take and take and take, assuming your own personage. You sit alongside it through its work meetings, its grad-school projects, those meandering conversations with…
At night, you temporarily slip free from its skin. You wring it thoroughly, hang it up to dry. You’ll repeat the process tomorrow, and the day after that, but for now you are given temporary respite.
You stare at the hollow thing - it or you, you can’t recall. You should try to familiarize yourself, but you never do. You’ve stopped striving for something to change. Day in, day out, you wait ever so patiently.
