i.
we learn about cell communication. signals tearing through membranes, ligands linking with receptors. in seconds, our bodies react to stimuli––enzymes spark & multiply, flare awake & gutter back into dormancy. our innards startle with ecstasy at each pinch, each hand brushed across our skin. at home, i carve my keys across my thigh. swipe the metal past the thin hairs on my flesh. my skin rises into pink ridges––flushed cross-hatches screaming under the fluorescence. i think of how, if i dug deeper, i might chisel a hole into my leg. stick my hand through the gap, feel the tender crimson of my inner lining. how, even as i whittle myself away, i am growing inside: cells multiplying & rallying in response to the cold caress of silver.

ii.
by spring, we move on to heredity. families simplified into colors & shapes on a pedigree: diseased fathers sitting in the neat borders of a blacked-out square, standing at a distance from their soft, circled wives. their children grouped below them, tethered together by a charcoal line. i’m sorry, mom, for not wanting to be your daughter. for rubbing away our penciled tether, palms grey & guilty. my high school years obscured by the white cavern of an empty page. you lost three girls before me, soft masses of cells that dissolved in your womb & passed through you, crimson. i’m sorry that you have to live with the silence in our hallway, you & me, three doors apart, lying still & heavy in our beds.

iii.
i am not the girl i was three years ago––two months ago, a moment ago. we are all theseus’s ship, bodies rebuilt in secret: cells flaking from the surface in mitosis, falling like ash until we are layered again, raw & coated anew. a match struck, burning out, struck again. we are always dying, always becoming. my soul is constant, though no microscope could prove it. i wonder if my skin remembers the boy i kissed by the river. whether his fingerprints died with my epidermis. everything about us was temporary—our breath fogging the air, sweat rising with the humidity, the linger of 99 proof burning our lips. & maybe that is all we are—a body of fleeting evidence, rewritten endlessly, each touch dissolving, each version of me already expiring.