Dry Maintenance

By Ruby Rosenthal

I somehow have become a woman instead of a girl and this fact is very confusing to me; a few years ago I didn’t floss very often or moisturize frequently, I’d take some of that slick cool Neutrogena hydrosauce, coat my fingers, and slather it all over the grooves of my face once a week max because sometimes it would get into my eyelashes, sometimes I would wake up and it would be stuck in my hair, sometimes being nineteen was all fun and games because I didn’t know yet what ailments I had, I didn’t know yet how quickly my body would be prone to developing pockets of fat in undesirable areas, I didn’t know yet that in my twenties, I would become dry everywhere—dry knuckles in the winter: peeling, bleeding, cutting, blood dripping onto my laptop into my gray snowflaked flannel sheets—sheets, by the way, that I never had to own, until my twenties, never knew they existed, until my twenties—but back to my hands, my hands are flaky and falling apart, no Walmart-branded moisturizer will soothe me, I pay full-price now for O’Keefe’s to keep me together and full price for a tar-scented medically induced moisturizer because eight months ago, my eyelids started peeling and I rubbed them until they became red and splotchy and so I put Aquaphor on my eyelids and then at a birthday party a friend’s rude girlfriend asked if my shiny eyelids were the new trend, but then I went to Charlottesville and my cousin asked me if I wanted to borrow her psoriasis medication, and that solved it, I guess, I have psoriasis, I guess, I have the thing that she has—thanks genetics, I guess—I have the thing that we in my family have up and down our elbows and our knees, the thing that we think would make no one ever fall in love with us, and so now, I have to face the how do I get rid of it, the what do I have to slather nightly, the how do I keep the flakes away, so now it’s tar-scented moisturizer on my eyelids, tar-scented moisturizer beneath my chin, tar-scented moisturizer on the small spot right below my lip, because it’s itchy, so itchy, I just want to scratch it all away and let the flakes fall to the ground, like when I was a kid that’s what I would do to my dandruff, taking my fingernails and carefully affixing them to my rounded scaly scalp scabs, hardened yet puffed, sensitive yet sturdy, and I would circle them, find where they started and where they ended, and slowly pull them out, doing it until my hair, my very dark hair, was dotted with white flakes dispersed between its roots, and the floor would be covered in my dead skin, impossible to clean up quickly, requiring a real vacuum or broom, not just the palm of my hands, but now I am a woman,

Ruby Rosenthal is a Chicago-based writer whose work appears or is forthcoming in Hypertext Magazine, The Rumpus, HerStry, Defenestration, and elsewhere.

Art by Yuliya Klochan.