farewell my beloved brunette, i embrace your knees

Legs. I have this dimpled flesh on the backs of my thighs that has always told me, don’t wear tiny shorts. My thighs are covered in broken veins. When I cut off cut off shorts as a teenager, I cut them off at the knees. My ankles are scarred from bug bites and growing up between woods and field, deer and horses, 22 cats. My legs are long. I am the only person who has ever said a bad word about them. My legs are so bright and pale in the sunlight. I don’t know the last time they saw it, 3 summers ago, maybe, in a swimming pool with rippled white lines and a blue tint, looking squat and weird like my astigmatism correction when it is time for new glasses. I have stopped apologizing for the hair that grows on them.  I have stretch marks on my knees, but I have always liked them. I got them from nights of agonized “growing pains aren’t real”. At that time it was the worst pain I had ever felt. Maybe my child pain threshold was very low. It’s hard to remember and compare pains, just waking at 2 am sobbing, and my mom rubbing my legs until I passed out again, more from exhaustion than relief. Now I am reminded when menstrual cramps wake me up at 2 am, sometimes crying, and they hurt all the way down my legs, to my toes. My mom tells me hers only hurt to her knees. Self portraits. My legs are often my subject when I am having a bad head day, perhaps my hands, open and vulnerable on my thighs, morning sunlight through the blinds, lines on my skin from wrinkled sheets and elastic hairbands. I tell a story I can read later, and am sometimes pleasantly surprised when someone else finds the same story there. When my own memory jars the memory of someone else. The story of my legs is the story of yours. 

(for bochallenge words with photo #1)