Sometimes I look at my hand and find it strange that I have never really seen it.
Not its shape. Its color.
Human skin has such a narrow spectrum, and somehow every shade within it looks inevitable. Brown, gold, pink, copper, beige, almost black. None of it looks painted onto us. It looks like what it is: blood, pigment, warmth, and flesh showing quietly through itself.
And perhaps that is why skin feels so intimate.
We never see a person directly. We see the surface their life reaches us through. A face becoming red from embarrassment. A hand growing pale in the cold. The cheek of someone you love pressed against a pillow. Eventually one particular shade, one particular face, becomes so inseparable from a person that looking at it can fill you with an almost childish affection: there you are.
Even our differences are written on this surface. Thousands of years of sunlight, geography, ancestry, movement, and survival reduced to subtle variations in pigment that we carry without thinking about them.
The strangest thing is that none of this feels strange.
I have lived inside this skin my entire life.
Only occasionally do I look down at my hands and realize:
this is what a human being looks like.