I usually don’t notice the color of my skin. But I was dialing the phone and being frustrated by IKEA’s phone tree, and I noticed a tiny spot of blood on my left hand where my index finger joins the hand (on the top, at the knuckle). It was a deep red hue, very vibrant and rich in tone. Next to my skin, it provided quite a contrast. My skin seems mostly to be varying shades of grey and a sick yellow-grey-green. Hints of pink somewhere underneath, but only where the skin is thin, at the knuckles and if I turn my hand over, on the palm. Where I can see blood vessels running under my skin they are only faint hints of tiny blue worms burrowing under skin and over bone inside me.
Slowly, as the tiny spot of blood dries to a more dull brown, now only hinting at the brilliant red it once was, the contrast begins to disappear against the grey on grey on grey of my workspace, and now my hands seem a little more human. Compared to a cold, mechanical array of shades of grey that they build computers and keyboards and even the lightly mottled surface of my desk with, through and through, under the harsh white lights, my hands begin to look like flesh again. Maybe something of my job is beginning to get to me and I’m turning into a cold, grey automaton everyday I sit in front of this array of flat grey surfaces, but at least I’m not gone quite yet.
