“While I wait, I decide to take a shower. This is an experience I had long forgotten, and I savor it like a first sip of wine, a first kiss. The steaming water cascades over my battered body, washing away months or years of dirt and blood, some of it mine, much of it others’. All this filth spirals down the drain and into the underworld where it belongs. My true skin emerges, pale gray, marked by cuts and scrapes and grazing bullet-wounds, but clean. This is the first time I have seen my body.”





