Skin
Tom Milsom Lyrics

It was the day after my second album Painfully Mainstream was finally released. I stepped out of the shower, my fingers corrugated by the water, and saw a little white flap of skin at the tip of my thumb. I dried myself off with the damp blue towel from the floor all the while looking at this flap. It was big, a hole in my hand that wouldn’t close up on its own, made of a dead layer of myself that it was time to remove. I pulled at the flap and watched in horror as it slid the skin off my thumb whole, like a sausage casing. It hung, limp, while I instinctively tried to back away from it, but of course, it was attached to my hand and so what else could I do but keep pulling, like a glove now, all five of my fingers detached from the translucent, alien thing that my body was birthing from its surface. As it began to separate from my elbow, I felt it tear at the top of my neck. I was almost sick, but I knew I couldn’t stop pulling, so, retching and terrified, I gave tug after tentative tug until the skin slid over my shoulder and I pulled my whole arm free. I looked at the virgin limb that I’d uncovered. It was grey, like a rainy day, and my veins were pulsing at my wrist in ways I’d never seen before. All my moles had gone, as well as all the hair. It was almost like a newborn, except where babies’ arms are full of insulating fat and untrained muscle and big unthinking innocent pre-proprioceptory movements, mine was poised and predatory, making tiny, wise adjustments to its tendons as I turned it and clasped it. I pulled the rest of my torso free and stepped out of the skin, leaving it limp and puddled on the floor. My new body was bone dry, and lightweight. I felt spry after shedding a whole dead layer, and sensitive to the touch. I felt my new body for the first time.

When my new skin was a week old, I sat at my piano to try starting something fresh. I was keen to see how my new body would work this out, but instead of rising to the occasion, my slimmer, streamlined fingers were skittery on the keys, ten miniature bambis on eighty-seven frozen lakes. The guitar was no better. The strings sliced my un-calloused tips and made them bleed. I was tired. Laughing made my new cheeks ache, and crying made them rashy. A week went by with no improvement and in desperation, I turned to my wardrobe. When I’d first removed the skin, I hadn’t known if it was to be of any use ever again but clever old me had had the foresight to keep it for a couple of months, just in case, and so there, airing on a hanger, were the fingers that had made all my chords before, the face that had felt all my tears before, the feet and shoulders and chest that had for nineteen years been my old translucent home. I reluctantly tugged it on. It was cold against my new skin, and heavy. It didn’t fit as tightly as it used to, and would bunch and sag, but it was fine around the fingers, and fine around the face. For a while, I was me again.

Weeks passed. I wrote more songs that could have sat side-by-side with the pieces that populated Painfully Mainstream. I considered re-releasing it as a double album. Then one day, I started to deteriorate. Holes were appearing in my skin suit, first at the pits where it would disintegrate, and then around my nipples and on my neck, tiny holes at first that would grow larger and more noticeable with the wear of every passing day. It took two weeks for the suit to be in tatters, but I steadfastly refused to take it off. The more it fell apart, the more comfortable it became. The more it felt like the real me.

It was a month before I noticed. With every passing day, my skin suit had been getting tighter and more contoured, and I relaxed into it, when any dermatologist could have told me that the last of the suit had slid away and what I was wearing now was my own skin, permanently darkened by the oils of the suit and gradually taught how to survive the everyday by the ever thinning layers of protection I had given it.
It was different now though. My new fingers had worked their way around what the skin had taught them, and held my knife and fork in an interesting way. They had a new relationship with the keys on my piano, half remembering the fond familiarity the old skin had taught them, and half remembering with care and consideration the uncoordinated confusion of their first try. My mouth started formulating words in a way my old ears had never heard, but the new ones were ready and able to drink them in and add them to the mix. I had a new way of working, and it would take me a year to become accustomed to it.




It was the day after I finally released Explorers 6. Everyone was happy, and I lay back on my bed, satisfied and idly toying with a little white flap of skin on the end of my thumb.