reminiscence

I was supposed to start a tiny letter with my sister but she claims to be uninspired so I’m just putting my eczema story here instead. Emily sent me her summer playlist as consolation.

My eczema origin story is that one summer growing up, I was in Los Angeles at the pool and got a terrible sunburn. It was the kind that blisters and peels and heats up your whole body like a fever. I think my mother submerged me in a cold bath just to get my body temperature down. It felt like the time I had the flu when I was a young child and my fever was so high I hallucinated a person walking into my room. High on my flu fever I had watched the movie Oklahoma!, an utterly terrifying movie in my delirious memory. Anyway, after the sunburn, I had recurring eczema for years, horrifying flakey patches on my inner arms and between my fingers and along my neck. I developed a strict skincare routine early on in life because of the eczema. I started moisturizing obsessively, using heavy unscented lotion, and plain white soap. I was too scared to use anything scented well into adulthood, too scared to use retinol, too scared to tan. Eczema has several sister afflictions, which I also sometimes suffer from. One is asthma, which I had for one strange year when I was in high school (it manifested like anxiety but my oxygen saturation was so low the doctor put me on steroids). The other is chronic urticaria, which is basically an allergy to hot water. It resurfaces sometimes, viciously. I take cold showers, take anti-histamines, suffer. When I have recurrent urticaria, my skin looks flushed and heavily textured all the time even when I'm not flaring, my heart beats too fast, I have dry eyes and peeling nails. I didn't know that this condition was called urticaria until the fall of 2020 when it reappeared after years lying dormant in my cells (presumably). I was house sitting at this brownstone in Prospect Heights (my roommate had been mauled by the owner's dog and they were trying to pay her off by letting us stay there) when I started to flare. It was around the time Joe Biden got elected. I sat in Prospect Park and drank a mini bottle of cava and felt sad. For my skin, for the world. Before I found out that my flare-ups had a medical basis, I thought they were simply an anomaly of my body. My body has other anomalies. When I stand up too quickly, I see bright spots in front of my eyes like tiny candles and feel a rush of dizziness. This may be called orthostatic hypotension or be a symptom of iron deficiency. I've never asked. Like my mother, I only go to urgent care and otherwise prefer to self-diagnose using the internet where all symptoms lead to extremely rare and inevitably fatal forms of illness.I went for a drink with a friend of a friend and told him about how our lifespan is only around four thousand weeks - my favorite conversation starter. I feel like you think about death a lot, he told me even though we had only just met. It's more that I worry about living well, about moral responsibility, and skincare, and all my bodily anomalies, and I tried to explain this. He was trying an ascetic lifestyle just to see what it would be like to have rules in your life for once. He told me I seemed very up on the culture to make up for saying I was obsessed with death.In a personalized rejection a few years ago, a magazine editor wrote me: "We need more eczema stories!" Maybe he was manifesting. In Sean Thor Conroe's autofictional novel, FUCCBOI, the main character suffers from severe and recurrent eczema. He goes to urgent care for steroids, his skin hanging off in strips. He describes himself as a "rare eczema leper." Maybe it's a metaphor for his alienation from himself, from masculinity, from the gig jobs he works, and his attempts to be a writer. Maybe it's just eczema—I didn't really understand FUCCBOI.  But Foucault argues in Madness and Civilization that leprosy was at least partially a social construct, and that leper colonies would later be replaced in public consciousness by psych wards.There's very little writing about eczema that I can find. No one seems to want to own up to having it. In something else I read, a character starts shedding his skin like a snake. At first he thinks it's eczema; then it peels all the way off leaving new, unblemished skin underneath. He too is alienated. Refinery29 claimed that eczema is a "hot girl ailment." On TikTok, under videos captioned "hot girls have eczema," none of the girls have visible eczema. Instead, they glow like they're phosphorous on the inside. I don't have eczema anymore, although I feel like it's lurking just below the surface of my skin at any time, waiting to be reactivated. The last time I had it was one summer in the south of France when it appeared all over my body like a second skin. At the pharmacy, I showed the pharmacist my bleeding arms and she offered me a bottle of moisturizer specifically designed to combat eczema. It healed my skin like magic, rapidly and totally. Thus reinforcing my demented, quasi-religious belief in the power of moisturizing.I still moisturize obsessively. Earlier this summer, I got a sunburn on my back from lying on Rockaway Beach for too long reading Jenny Hval. I rubbed aloe on it dutifully and waited for the skin to blister and crack. But instead it faded and then healed.