My skin remembers everything. The doctors call it dermatographia. Skin writing. When I run my nails across anywhere on my body, say to scratch an itch, my skin reddens into a raised wheal and you can see the exact path my nails have travelled. Doctors say the cause is unknown but that it’s triggered in some people by allergens or medications, sometimes even by emotional upheaval. In my case, contact with a sharp-enough object that puts just the right amount of pressure would be enough. When my daughter was born, we didn’t know how to talk to each other but we had touch to bridge that wide gap. I held her to know if she wanted to be carried, had her latch onto me to know if she was hungry. 

At four and still mastering the alphabet, she discovered this thing about my skin. I would let her scratch letters on my arms; half the alphabet was on my left, the other, on my right. It stung a bit and the buzzy feeling lasted long after she lifted her little finger from my arm. That tiny digit tracing the building blocks of language onto me was capable of inflicting, let’s call it pain, in such a specific way. It wasn’t intentional. She just wanted to learn and I wanted to let her. 

She mastered her alphabet long ago, mastered speech and writing; she no longer needs my arms for that purpose. We are two continents, our edges separated by different needs. When I feel like the years are moving at a blurry speed that I can’t control, I remind myself this is the goal, her independence. 

She comes back sometimes, like when she helps carry groceries from the car and into the house. We follow a predictable path from the driveway to the door, and back again. She props the door open for me and takes a bag from my arm and carries it inside. I think of how I want to hold her again. But I know that if I express my joy too openly and too earnestly she will startle like a wild rabbit and leap away, embarrassed for the both of us. Instead, I ask, “Are you hungry?” and she answers, “I can eat.”

On the day she was to start preschool, she clung to my leg. Her grip was so tight that her fingers left horizontal marks, lines so perfect you’d think a cartographer drew them using a parallel ruler to trace the course of bearing.   

In college she learned about Harlow’s classic experiment, the one with infant rhesus monkeys that were made to choose between a soft cloth-covered wire mother over an uncovered one. Even when the bare wired mothers held the milk bottles, the infants chose the soft mothers, sometimes going hungry. Often their hunger led to their death. “Harlow,” it said in her textbook, “examined love’s true nature.” 

When my daughter called to tell me about the study, her voice crackled over the line. “Infant love was not about hunger or thirst,” she says. Some of her words cut out, replaced by static and buzz, becoming an aural facsimile for touch. Though I miss some of what she said, I don’t interrupt or ask her to repeat herself because I know that tone. I hold the receiver closer to my ear, to bring her closer to me.  She's talking her way towards a discovery. I listen intently, waiting for her to say what I know; our skin remembers it all.

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Tricia Gonzales lives and works in Fairfax County in Northern Virginia. She has taught creative writing and literature at George Mason University and she currently teaches composition at Northern Virginia Community College’s Loudoun campus, as well as for Nysmith, School for the Gifted. She received her M.F.A. in fiction from George Mason University and her work has appeared in writing journals including VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, PANK, and Peaks and Valleys.

ART BY:
Katie Wolf
The Daughters of Zeus & Mnemosyne (detail, slide #3)
Analog collage and cardboard slide mounts
2024