Shedding Skin

When you ask how long it takes to get over someone, people love to offer formulas. Half the time you were together. A few months. A lifetime. I once read it takes seven years, the same amount of time it takes for the body to completely shed and renew its skin.

If you think about it, the body does remember. It isn’t just your head. As the author of The Body Keeps the Score says, experiences get imprinted in us. Trauma, love, loss, they live in our muscles, our bones, even in our skin. By that logic, maybe in seven years your body has turned over enough cells to finally loosen its grip on what once felt unforgettable. You don’t erased, you remember, but the intensity has softened.

I also read something recently about Saturn and its seven-year cycles. How, every seven years, we undergo monumental change. Maybe not obvious to the eye, but undeniable within. At seven you first begin to know yourself. At fourteen, puberty cracks you open. At twenty-one, adulthood. At twenty-eight, commitments: marriage, kids, or the choices you did or didn’t make. At thirty-five, maybe children again, maybe divorce. At forty-two, a reckoning. At forty-nine, here I am.

This year has been my most solitary, and by choice. I’ve enjoyed my own company more than ever. I’ve learned myself better than ever. And strangely, I was diagnosed with an odd, temporary autoimmune condition affecting my skin. As if my body itself is screaming, We are changing. I’m going to make it obvious to you and everyone else.

So yes, I am literally shedding skin. Not dramatically, like a snake slipping out of its old body in one swoop. More subtle than that. Though, honestly, part of me wishes I could just rip it all off and be done.

The way I once loved doesn’t sting the same. It doesn’t run as deep. It’s no longer engraved in every cell of me. Whether I like it or not, my body has said enough. It is letting go in ways my mind and heart have been practicing for years, slowly, painfully, with ups and downs, with the quiet grief that comes when something that once defined you now lives only in your chest like a faint echo.

This morning, under the shower, I cried. A single tear for what once was, a love so defining, so sure, so consuming I never wanted to let it go. But it also brought me immense pain. And now, as my skin renews itself, my body insists: let go.

So I let the tear run down my face. I placed my hand over my heart. Because that’s where the good pieces of something real still live, and always will.