...By its cover

"Angsting in the dark" has become a sort of catchphrase among a certain circle of my friends, a tongue-in-cheek snipe at "emo kids" and people who like black hair dye, Hot Topic, feeling depressed, and goth music. As with any jibe, however, there seems to be a seed of truth to it. I don't know if it's the same for everyone but I know that as far as I'm concerned, nighttime, rainstorms, and cold weather tend to be the times I become most introspective. During bright days and warmer weather, I usually find myself too wrapped up in joie de vivre, "real world" stress, or a lethargic mental state exacerbated by excessive heat to spend too much time introspecting or dwelling on matters of a more existential bent.

I was kind of surprised, then, when I started to realize that this hot, muggy, oppressive spell we've been going through has elicited just that reaction, and through an unexpected medium.

Considering that I've lived with it my entire life, it's kind of amazing how little attention I've ever paid to my skin, but how very much it seems to express. I touch my arms, and my skin feels both cool and hot at the same time, maybe even in the same spot. There's a softness to it in places, while in other spots there's a toughness that takes it as faith and a matter of fact that needles won't prick it, paper won't cut it, and hot steering wheels won't burn it. And the color, which sometimes seems so uniformly pale in the wintertime, becomes vibrant this time of year. My neck has been sun-baked into a permanent terracotta, somewhere between the powdery dirt your feet kick up on bone-dry days, and the heavy red clay native to where I grew up. My arms, my legs, the rest of my body, follows a gradient from pale and sandy to bold, ruddy hues. Across my shoulders where a shirt normally lies, freckles stand out like beacons against the washed-out background, but on my arms and face they sprawl and overlap so you can hardly tell them apart - too proud not to be seen, but too lazy to separate themselves from their peers. Underneath it all are the phantoms and traces of veins, which are visible even at this time of year. Bruises add to and get lost in the calamitous palette, bringing new shades (sometimes striking, sometimes muted) to my shins and knees and elbows. Thin seams of red allude to encounters with blackberry brambles, overly playful dogs, and similar adventures. In the heat and humidity, a thin sheen seems to coat my skin, making my clothes stick uncomfortably, and everything else more difficult to hold. When I itch from mosquito bites, the scratch marks last a while before fading away.

Even when it's ultimately depressing, there always seems something pristine about nighttime introspection. A person can conceive of their "self" as separate from their body, and thoughts and emotions somehow seem more "pure". When you can focus more directly on your thoughts and feelings, they seem more essential, almost monolithic. In the summertime, though, I never seem to be able to achieve this state - the heat and humidity and brightness cause a persistent, mild awareness of my own body that prevents me from achieving a wintry "pristine-ness". My thoughts are more scattered, more banal; less regal and more natural. Instead of the highest echelon of existential creation ("Oh what a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties. . ."), I feel unfinished - only partially formed.

And you know what? That's true. Summertime reminds me that in a field of athletes, I'm just the guy who likes to run around and kick the ball; that in a gallery of fine statues, I'm just a schoolchild's sculpture - a farm animal made of paper-mâché. Never before have I been a complete work, and even now I'm still in the process of becoming - and I have all the inconsistent textures, asymmetries, uneven colors, and gracelessness to prove it.

This summer I've felt like a lot of dirt and sweat and roughness, but that's been a reminder I needed. As lofty and noble as the spires of philosophy are, how can you expect to reach them without a foundation in what it is to be human, a foundation built on dirt and sweat and roughness?