got enough to keep me going, keep me from the brink, as your bones grew, why did you become you?

I've been thinking about skin a lot lately. There are nights, God, there are so many nights where I will lay in the dark for hours and think about the language of bodies and try to speak to my own skin. I will ask my skin to talk back, to say something, to say anything. What language does my body speak? What would it say? And then I’ll think about other parts of the body and what they would say if they could speak. The spine is the most constant, the body part most willing to tell me it loves me, that it will hold me up despite the weight gain, despite the years. The jawbone would talk about words, endlessly words, how much it loves them. How much it despises them. The lungs and heart are a package deal and will not go anywhere without the other. Their love is the kind of love I want. Necessary. Unfaltering. The kind of love you can feel. The liver will talk about his drinking problem, how he’s in love with the pancreas but she won’t have him because of the alcohol. He will die alone and seems to be accepting of this. The appendix just wants to be important. Crucial, even. The kidneys are ten-year-old twins and talk about holding on even if the other one can’t. Or won’t. The large and small intestines don’t know how to survive without the other. They know the body well. They know its corners and edges, have spied the bottom-most layer of skin. They dream of togetherness. The knees, elbows, wrists, and ankles are mostly silent but they wear their scars proudly like medals from the days of bicycles and games of kickball. The throat, tongue, and teeth try to seduce their way out of answering. The eyes can’t stop talking about the sunset from last week. They all revolve around the bellybutton, the epicenter, the beginning. The other organs and the other parts of the body view the navel as something of a god, a miracle most miraculous and I think that maybe the body is multilingual, communicating unsaid things—things we can’t say, are too afraid to say, to hold onto, to keep.