47 As you grow older, desquamation slows. From child to teen, you change skins as easy as changing clothes. You wear it out, running it ragged at the edges, bloody knees and torn fingertips, tearing it and dirtying it then shedding it for that fresh new pair, clean and crisp like shirts hot from the dryer. As you grow old, it’s not so easy. You pull the fresh skin out and find that it’s still damp. Maybe the vent’s clogged or a breaker’s been tripped. You can fix that. Stick a long metal wire down the vent and fish out the lint. Flip the breaker. Put the skin back in and push a button. Listen to it turn. And if it’s still damp, maybe you just need a new dryer. Where does the old skin go? Like lint in a clogged dryer vent, it flies out the back and into the air, dusting up and joining with the clouds to make static electricity and rain. Maybe there’s a bit of you exploring the Andes in a thundercloud, drifting down over whitewashed Aconcagua at angles only possible for a-bit-of-dead-skin-in-a-thundercloud to catch. You should have sent a camera with him. Sometimes the old cells stick around. Not every bit of dust is consumed by wanderlust. Sometimes they just like to stay where it’s familiar––in that chair where you sit every morning to drink your coffee, in the crevices of your bed, in the sleeve of that really comfy sweater you don’t want to ruin in the wash. Desquamation accumulates. Each night I lay in bed for eight hours. That’s seven hundred ninety-four million six hundred eighty-five thousand five hundred fifty-five and fifty-six hundredths (794,685,555.56) skin cells accumulating in my bed in one night. I change my sheets on Saturdays. That’s five billion five hundred sixty-two million seven hundred ninety-eight thousand eight hundred eighty-eight and ninety-two hundredths (5,562,798,888.92) skin cells a week. The longest I’ve gone without sheet changing is three months. Seventy-one billion five hundred twenty-one million seven hundred thousand and four-tenths (71,521,700,000.4) skin cells, which is twenty-one billion four hundred fifty-six million five hundred ten thousand and four-tenths (21,456,510,000.4) more than are required in making another human being. Enter Wendigo, old friend, faithful enemy, the accumulation of all my yesterdays, skin cells compounded between my sheets. My Wendigo is mounded in my bed. She is sleepy and does not wish to get up. I understand
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