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I have an unbelievably painful and invasive cold sore on the left peak of my upper lip, with an accompanying smaller pimple on the right peak. The cold sore started as a series of bumps, lightish brown and yellow in the way of bacterial skin, that then coagulated into a large spot, Jupiter’s red eye. It arrived Monday morning, almost having peeled off from another surface onto my face in sleep. I lifted my head from the pillow and there it was. Yesterday I picked at it with tweezers, obsession trumping any sense of self destruction. The scab came away in pieces and I was left with a slick and pink smear of raw skin and flesh and lip. What are lips made of?

I had not been calling it a cold sore until that point, somehow ashamed of the connotation of one. Googling it resulted in cancer and herpes, of course. One website for a targeted product – an anti-viral cream I eventually left my house to purchase – listed the reasons one would get a flare-up, and they were all gentle admonishments for a messy, neglectful life. Not enough water, not enough sleep, too much stress, time of moon. As I rub the cream into the sore, like soothing a wounded animal, I feel the relief and satisfaction of self-care. Even if it wasn’t preventative. Every so often small pinpricks of pain shoot from the very center of this small abomination. I fill up a jug of water and take it upstairs to my bedroom with a small glass tumbler. I sleep earlier than my usual 5am bedtime, and wake up in between my two alarms. I do not feel terrible. I eat a hearty breakfast (two slices of pie, but breakfast is breakfast). I add two bottles of vitamins – daily and C – to my water jug by my bedside. The sun comes in, my sheets are clean (doing laundry was another soothing, curing measure) and it is still morning. I try not to think of the red beacons on my face.

When I wrote my post on my scalp bumps and chest pimples, I was hesitant. I felt like I was revealing intimate things about my body, but worst of all I was revealing unflattering things about my body. It was gross. Bodies are gross! But here I was, telling everyone about the very specific ways in which my body is gross. I deleted the dozen or so footnotes and parenthetical asides I had written in there to apologize for this “transgression”, and then I tweeted the above.

My friend Cass and I talk a lot about writing, and how life affects your writing, and the various ways of “being” when you’re a 20-something female university student, affected by culture, environment, the Internet, etc and trying to write and be a writer. So after I tweeted that, I had the vague notion that it might catch her attention. Isn’t that another new kind of modern intimacy? The quiet ways in which we decorate our social networks to cater to the people we care for? Anyway, recently we had a silent Skype session (her sound card wasn’t working) and so we typed our thoughts to one another while looking to see if the other person really was “l”-ing “ol” (we were).

Maybe she brought up what I had tweeted, or we were talking about wanting to no longer feel apologetic for being truthful and trying. And I made a nervous joke about how next year will be the year where we start doing this, all in. “2012 means never having to say you’re sorry.” It was a little glib, and a little wryly jokey about something we both felt so strongly about. It could mean so much or nothing at all. It has the virtue of being a completely sincere statement that sounds like the motto of a complete asshole. But I am done apologizing. I am done with sorry for sorry’s sake. A little less than a month ago I wrote, Oh the pains of being your own person, of living in your own skin, of speaking in your own voice, and declaring yourself. I am, I am, I am.

That call resonated with a few people, and it echoes here again now.

And here, an outtake that’s not an outtake, because it is the end of the year and I am reading a book and I am feeling full up with words and more words.

There’s a section in The Importance of Being Iceland by Eileen Myles that is simply called “Body”. The first essay is titled “Live Through That?!” and it is about Eileen’s teeth. At least I think it is about her teeth, but maybe it is about teeth in general. She talks about how she flosses obsessively because her father lost his teeth at 40 and then at 44, died. She writes of dreams of tooth-loss (we all have those; mine involved a futuristic Tokyo-like town, and my teeth in a bowl of water growing into apples) and of privileging the dentist over therapy because the dentist is pretty equal to therapy for her, and then she writes about the indulgence of tumbling into bed, face unwashed and teeth unbrushed and unflossed. The decadence of such hygienic neglect. Inside, a small part of me squirmed. Reading this book has been like throwing stones into the deep well that resides within me. Nothing but small ripples, but those stones fall deep and fast and now will live forever in the bottom depths of me, changing the water, changing the well. A river, a waterfall, a desert.

That decadence is how I live. I never brush my teeth or wash my face before I sleep. I never floss. My dentist tells me time and again the nature of my teeth’s surface means they stain easily, and that I should abstain from tea and coffee as much as I can. In my pantry there is a newly bought box of Earl Grey tea bags. I drink with abandon, I fall to sleep in the late/early hours with abandon, I eat with abandon, I let my skin go dry and ashy at the knees, elbows and the front of my calves. There are weird circular patches of skin on my inner thighs that are darker and dryer, spotted and spread amidst the reeds of my stretch marks. I do not know what they are but they turn red in hot weather.

Earlier in this increasingly long essay I talked about picking at my face with tweezers, and I stopped myself from apologizing for that, even though I know I should. It’s bad for me. All of you are nothing but well wishers, I choose to believe. All these small transgressions on my crumbling life – the life that flakes to dust at the same rate of anyone around me – and I could be doing so much better.

At our office Christmas lunch on Monday, I told someone my mother died when I was 8. It came about as it usually does, we speak of family and they pick up on the gaps in my story, and I tell them why there are gaps. It’s all very civilized now, not a big deal at all. She asked how my mother died, and I told her. She said “Oh, that’s horrible. The worst thing about that is you never know when it’s going to happen.” I nod. I nod and I say “Yes. Yes, that’s right”, and deep within me something shifts. You can be placid and completely violent all at the same time, isn’t that life? Isn’t that having feelings, and a heart and a brain, and the memory of a dream that is a soul?

The box of anti-viral cream tells me to apply 5 times a day for 5-7 days. I stand in front of the mirror, and squeeze a small amount onto my (soap-washed and dried) fingertip and rub it onto my cold sore, slow, and then vigorous. I think about how dirty every single thing is, and my fingers feel sticky on everything they touch. This keyboard I tap on, this mouse I scroll. All of it, dirty. There is residue from the cream, that I leave, for some reason thinking that this will help with the absorption. This abundance an effective attack on my inflammations, my rebellious, troublesome body.