Hancock 1 Thomas Hancock Ms. Gardner English Hon.

2 Period 15 January 2013 Honors English Reflective Essay-Skin

Your skin, said Mr. Carter, is an organ. I remember looking down at myself at this moment and seeing my skin. I sat there, in my fifth grade science class at La Tercera Elementary, contemplating this new development. It had always seemed prior to this day, just very ordinary and frighteningly unexceptional. It, to me, served no other purpose other than to give me a color to my body and to cause pain when cut my finger or scraped my knee on the school blacktop. I treated this new knowledge with such nonchalance that even the most apathetic person in the world would have been jealous. I couldnt believe it. And yet there goes Mr. Carter, the ever-enigmatic science teacher, droning on about how the skin was used to cool you off and keep you warm and to protect your muscles and act as one of the five senses. I kept on blocking out his information thinking that I couldn't be the only one believing this farce. I mean, sure we all knew that the Hulk in The Avengers had big green bulletproof skin and that Mrs. Incredible from The Incredibles could stretch her skin out to alarming lengths and form it into the most bizarre shapes imaginable, but that was all in movies, it was fake. The skin couldnt do things like that or anything special in real life. That one character with the flaming skin in the Fantastic Four movies was nothing special. Sandman was a fallacy of the worst kind. The Hulk was cool, but it is clear that skin cant ever be like that in real life; he had some kind of radiation sickness which would actually kill someone in real life. The flaming man in Fantastic Four got that from a solar flare or something that would also kill a human. As a result, I could conclude that skin just wasnt exciting. It wasnt fun, only something to be washed every day

Hancock 2 before bed, which always led to soap running into my eyes and causing me to cry in agony for the next ten minutes. I never believed it true that something so.unimpressive could have such an elegant sense of purpose. My parents, as always, were quick to question my line of thinking on this topic. It is just not true! I said with a naivety that only a ten-year-old would understand, How can my skin be an organ! I know what organs look like, Mr. Carter showed me a picture of them. Theres the brain, heart, lungs, stomach, small and large intestines, the kidneys! They are all inside my body! My skin is on the outside of my body, and so it is not an organ. Organs cant be on the outside of the body. My father looked at me with amusement. Son, Mr. Carter is right, its science. All of those things that he said are true. Your mother agrees. I looked at her, and she was nodding her head enthusiastically. Well I still dont believe it! I exclaimed with a slight pout in the lip, You guys are wrong, and I wont change my mind! My parents, seeing that I wouldn't break, just nodded casually, knowing that I would change my mind eventually. They were right. I did not turn around for a few months, and I probably wouldnt have if it werent for outside influence. Mr. Carter would continue to teach us about the skins various properties and abilities, and quite frankly, I became astounded at what I was told. The skins capability to heal itself by clotting platelets and its ability to both retain heat in cold weather and vent heat from the body in hot weather was incredible. It finally seemed to me that there was more to skin than met the eye. And my assumptions would only become stronger; I would pay more attention to injuries that I had sustained, and I was able to witness the skin in action. I saw the gradual process of healing, and how the skin could so easily regenerate itself. But I was merely scratching the surface of understanding; I had yet to become aware of the extent of the

Hancock 3 life that my skin possessed. As my body matured, I became wary of a whole different life my skin expressed. A more spiritual, ethereal sense of living. I looked at my skin and saw it move, rippling with the movement of muscles and criss-crossed with channels of blood vessels every time I exercised myself. It seemed to have a life of its own, sometimes bulging and straining with barely constrained energy, and sometimes limp and complacent. It, like me, was aging, showing signs of experience and life. The numerous times I spiked myself during the track season of my ninth grade year were written like a story on my right calf. The scar the size of two quarters on my right elbow mocked the time I dived to catch a football on asphalt like an imbecile. I was sure that somewhere on the back of my head was an enormous hole from the time that I hit my head on a rock during sixth grade camp. And the bulge on my left index finger that has, against all reason, remained visible even after I jammed it in football practice months before, reminds me of the joys and hardships of that season. I never really shared my observations with any of my friends or family; it was food for contemplation that I wanted to digest myself, without any outside help. Strangely, I would often talk to myself about it when I was younger; it was just one of the many things one might consider weird about me at this period of my life. I might spend hours engrossed in this world of mine where even skin could have a personality. And now, writing this narrative, I have come to the conclusion that my skin is just a part of a larger idea. Its proof that life is present in everything that the world contains; even something as mediocre as human skin. Skin reflects the personality of the person it cloaks; scars advertise an adventurous persona, uncommonly white skin can show that a person is unsocial, liver spots and wrinkles telegraph age and experience. Skin, like its host, changes as it ages; it tells the story of all of ones adventures, ones personality, and serves as a book to record all that happens in the future.

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Works Cited Fantastic Four. Dir. Tim Story. Perf. Chris Evans. 20th Century Fox, 2005. Film.

"human skin". Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica Online. Encyclopdia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 07 Mar. 2014 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/547591/human-skin>.

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The Avengers. Dir. Joss Whedon. Perf. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, and Samuel . Marvel Studios, 2012. Film.