I used to persistently think about skin as a child. I grew up on a council estate where, in the summertime, we turned the concrete ramps and driveways into racetracks; us cyclists and scooters were sugared up on pastel ice cream. The kids were catching the breeze in shorts the colour of grass and football teams. I was amidst the heat, daydreaming: watching myself in shorts, too, imagining a pair of smooth legs to wear them. I knew that skin was a mercurial and fluctuating thing: sometimes dry, or itchy, or growing spots, but I had an unsettled mind: one too preoccupied with the circumstances of my own skin.
At eleven months old, an accident left roughly twenty percent of my skin with second- and third-degree burns. And when I was eight, I watched Courage the Cowardly Dog on a heavy CRT television—the purple dog, over and over again, was inundated with unpredictable circumstances: one time wedged inside a door, another time hurtled far away from their strange and liminal world. The ease at which Courage got hurt, to then change back into their ordinary body had me thinking about my own reality.
On planet Earth, anything can happen, and there are instances where there is nothing you can do about it. So how, then, do you not persistently grasp for control? Given my age, I lacked the words for these vague notions, and I did blame myself, even without any memories of that afternoon. How did I not realise that water isn’t just for cleansing or nourishing, but that water, or anything, could also be volatile; that anything could be mercurial?
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I think mercuriality is the spider spinning our web. We were born and trapped in the centre. There are patterns in the construction, yet no two spiders spin the same. When the spider silk pours: we cannot know, exactly, if it will go left or right, up or down, around or around.
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Burns can heal in an erratic fashion. I have hypertrophic scarring, which means large areas on my hands and legs are slightly raised, like seeing flat islands on a sea. There are thick tributary-like scars and ridges. And there are rectangular plots where skin was taken and grafted onto a new place. I wore snug, not-so-flesh-coloured pressure garments, and at school, I hid my legs under shiny, opaque tights. Sometimes aunties would hold my hands, fretting as if I’d spilt Coke over my birthday shirt, telling me, “You’re still a beautiful girl.” I knew they meant well, but I also got the sense there was something irreversibly wrong with me. And every once in a while, my hospital would summon us up (our group of young burns survivors), they took us camping to adventure by the fresh lakes; they sat us down and taught us how to navigate the world bravely and with confidence; their insight rubbed on me like a kind of salve that, over the years, would sink through all the muddled spaces of introspection.
My scars had solidified into what they would be for the rest of my life: so I acknowledged this, packed it in that bag we carry with us through adolescence and braced for the rest—all the other mercurial things.
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I think mercuriality is the spider spinning our web. If their silk is stronger than steel, why are we floundering? There could be beauty tangled in these threads. We can see it, or if we cannot, we are yet to.
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One day as a teenager, I realised it was irrational to expect an infant-me to understand caution (how could I have escaped the hot tap of a bath when I could barely hold a plastic cup, drink, and remain dry). I turned my attention inwards and outwards as if my whole body were made of magnifying glass. The newspapers and televisions were saying anything could happen at any time; you must be careful. Schoolteachers and family were saying listen; learn from your own and our mistakes; the world is feral.
But life is far too unpredictable to be truly prepared. Even as adults, we can list our moments of shock or confusion and all the hows or whys we relentlessly question.
Our sense of the mercurial can displace us, even with our efforts for understanding or meaning-making. I was a teenager, and scars are permanent, and no you cannot change them, but you want to. Sometimes when we are unsteady, we accept the circumstances and sometimes we look for control.
As a teenager, my control tactic was to play video games or read in the library after school; I was entering worlds where the ‘I’ had smooth skin or magical skin or was a no-skin god. At the same time, London’s gentrification was ongoing. Our neighbourhood had spread itself high and low: into flats, and maisonettes, and temporary housing. There were Myspace pages to manage. There were AOL statuses to amend. The world was unfolding, and I was restless impulse and angst. I told my mother things, youthfully assured, “It’s emo. I’m not changing! This is who I am.”
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I think mercuriality is the spider spinning our web. If all parts cascade from another then all parts are interconnected. To understand how a new-spun thread stands, we must acknowledge those that came before.
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Later (no longer ‘emo’): I spent a lot of time on an Emergency Admissions ward. I walked with a clipboard in my hands, working as one of the clinical pharmacists. And in some sense, it was as though a lens had been flipped: where I was the face talking with a patient admitted after their own circumstances. I worked with my hands and forearms on show eight hours a day. And on no particular day I can remember (somewhere between the therapy sessions and the late-night cheerleaders of club toilets), I realised that outside of my critical mind parroting why and what if: no one was thinking about my scars anywhere near the amount I was. I realised this with all the freedom and embarrassment of someone learning if you get a question wrong, you should try again. I put that lesson in my metaphorical bag and took it through my career changes and location changes and began to let go of the things, the mercurial things.
Because there are times when acceptance is the best way to tame the mercurial. And these days, I find myself on a seesaw. On this seesaw is a bold printed “SCARS”. On one end is a shadowy body of the pseudo-acceptance, and on the other is the genuine-acceptance. More often than not, the latter is higher.
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I think mercuriality is the spider spinning our web. If we choose to keep still, we may notice how natural it is, watching it spin away.
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Years are passing and I think about how there are patterns to chaos. Out there is a yellow dwarf star; a raging ball of hydrogen and helium. One day, it will expand and lose heat as a red giant. Current estimates propose dates that vary by the billions—so someday it will happen; we know the signs in the data to analyse. On planet Earth, terrible, mercurial things might happen to us, and hopefully (eventually), we see the signs and accept them when we need to. Once we cool off, we might tell ourselves that things have changed, but things will settle someday. Or we tell ourselves that scars are an interesting mosaic of healing. We may say things like, “it is what it is”, or in my community, we might say, “we move”. We spin together around the sun and share our stories, and as if by osmosis, all that mercuriality and all that chaos shows itself in the prose or plot or structure.
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I think mercuriality is the spider spinning our web. When we zoom all the way out, we can see ourselves: the billions and billions on one giant web.
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I’m an aunty and a godmother. Sometimes, children will ask what happened when they see my hands. I explain what I know and tell them to be careful around stoves, and kettles, and other hot places. Sometimes, they ask if they can touch the scars. When they do, they tend to ask if it hurts, and then I say no, it doesn’t hurt at all. Because eventually, the mercurial things become a remembrance. And in this present time, I’m thinking about the sun peeping through an emptied cloud. I’m thinking about the moment we notice we can put our hoods down or pack our umbrellas away or play outside again. And before the next thing happens, a spider, somewhere between the branches, is checking on its web, while the rest of us sky gaze and dry off our skin.
Moriam E. Kuye (she/her) is a Nigerian-British writer from London, UK. Her work has appeared in Worlds of Possibility. She often wonders at night whether she will regret staying up for another hour. You can find her on Twitter at @moriam_emi or on Bluesky @moriamekuye.bsky.social.
Photo by Torbjørn Helgesen on Unsplash
