Five Thousand More of These and I Can Make a Jacket

I like to peel the skin off my feet. I used to peel from my big toes, as well as that fleshy underpart on the outer side of each foot, as well as sometime right in the centre of that front pad area. These were the areas I would sometimes get hard callousy skin that eventually got kind of itchy and bothered me. Instead of going to a pedicurist and having these areas sloughed off with professional tools, I would sit down with the spiky fold-out part of a nail clipper, create a starting cut, and start peeling.

My goal would be to peel off the largest single piece of skin possible without causing bleeding. Oftentimes, I would get carried away and end up bleeding anyway, and then my feet would hurt, and it would be difficult to walk, and I would have to wear bandaids for a few days. Like a perverse tribute to my ancestors who had their feet bound for reasons of perceived beauty.

Anyway, I have gradually phased out the peeling of foot skin in the past several years so that now, it's pretty much strictly toeskin peeling. Only the hard skin on the outer-under edge of each big toe. I had decided that peeling from the other parts and making them bloody was too painful, and so now I only peel the big toe, and only on occasions where the skin has gotten way too thick and hard for any sort of comfort, and only when Eric isn't looking.

Eric HATES when I do this. It grosses him out more than any other thing that I do. This includes popping all forms of pus-filled growth on either my own or his body/face, picking all forms of scabs on either my own or his body/face, and farting everywhere due to pregnancy. It's possible that the main reason he hates this particular habit is because I like to save the large pieces of toeskin as triumphant trophies, and I leave them lying about the condo. They sit and dry with each passing hour, turning into hard scratchy pieces of skin-sheet-rock. I leave them on the coffee table, on my nightstand and if he's really lucky, on his nightstand as a token of my love and esteem. He will get angry and loud, and gather up the toeskin sheets and flush them down the toilet, while I scrabble after him trying to pry them from his fingers, begging to be allowed to keep them for just one more week.

He has been so strict in the flushing of my toeskin, that I have taken to saving them in my pockets. Not any pocket in particular, just any pocket of what I happen to be wearing. This usually means the pockets of pyjama pants, pyjama tops, jeans, or the pockets bathrobes. And then I forget about them.

When Eric does my laundry, the pieces of toeskin will reconstitute in the washing machine, rehydrating into soft supple sheets of what could be the soft virgin skin from an innocent child. It's really quite lovely. Unfortunately, when Eric finds these large, soft, rehydrated sheets of skin, he gets ESPECIALLY grossed out and throws an otherwise even bigger fit than if it had just been on his nightstand.

Earlier today, I did a load of red and purple clothes. As I pulled them from the washing machine, out tumbled one of these pieces of reanimated toeskin. And not only had it been given new life, it had been DYED PURPLE!! It was one of the coolest things ever!!

Since Eric didn't sleep all last night and stayed up working, I've left them on his nightstand as a special present, to show him how much I love him. I think he's going to like them.