Speaking of molting

Watching the skin fall off of my entire leg, ankle, and foot as they heal, and as the puckered incision transforms to a smooth, thin, purple scar, I'm reminded of a short piece-- a prose poem, some might call it-- I wrote several years ago now. It was published in Voices in the Attic, which is the annual anthology of work put together by my Carlow University writing community, Madwomen in the Attic. Since it's been a few years, and the print version doesn't get widely circulated, I thought I'd repost it here. I'm not a huge fan of reading climbing poetry, but still I wrote one myself. It just came out of me so easily and ready-made. I did very little work to it. Why can't it always be this easy?

Same Old Fingerprints by Jen Hemphill

(after T.R.*)

After I’m home from climbing, my fingerprints are gone. The telltale loops and whorls come back eventually, but for a time my fingertips are smooth. I can't use them to access my computer or my phone. I have to type in passwords. My devices don’t know who I am, but nobody has been surprised to see me. I must morph into a slightly different person when I climb— even indoors on plastic holds for two hours. Am I a sort of shapeshifter, a changeling? I am not quite myself, not quite identifiable, not quite Jen. 

(Which I is I?)

When I go on a climbing trip and I am out for days and days in a row, for hours and hours, nurturing my relationship with rocks and sky and cactus and creosote (a woman goes far to find out what she is…), what happens to me then? What happens when I climb almost every day of the weeks and weeks I am away? Maybe I am not quite Jen that entire time.  Is that why, when I finally return home from such a trip, I find it excruciating to fit back into life? I have to be birthed back into me? A rebirth that includes the skin on my hands molting off before my fingerprints deign to return. Does my body need to shuck off the climber to get back an identity that feels at home doing banal, mundane everyday things, able to keep pace with the herky-jerky of Real Life? 

(Which Life is Real?) 

My eyes water. I ache— I have to let go of the part of me that has mingled with rocks from another place and time, the part of me that has connected so completely with stone that maybe I became a part of it, that landscape where the boulders sit, and that sunshine, and that yellow prairie grass being blown about by that desert wind. 

A part of my soul seems to shed too, that part which dug in deep with the Spirit in that place, that part I can only find and hear when I'm away, that part finally able to pray in pure, uninhibited movement and wide open spaces. Maybe when I get home, I lose the direct connection with the part of me which can truly identify as Child of God. I itch. I squirm, like a fly keeps buzzing at the sill. I don’t want to lose it. I want to go back under the dome of sky, to stay, and be blown about by the Spirit like the rippling yellow grass.

Yet as the layers finish peeling away, flesh and spirit, I am revived, a little more whole, a little more willing to engage with this life at home— my self able to breathe. I fit back in. I settle. The connection isn’t lost— the boulders, the yellow grass, the desert wind, space and Spirit and Child of God, are all in here, filling me up, part of me now. I molted in order to fit back into this body of mine. 

I have expanded and need new room, new skin. But I am not a new me, I am the whole me— entirely recognizable— with the same old fingerprints.

*Note: TR is Theodore Roethke, and my piece has echoes of his poem, "In a Dark Time".