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Nothing has yet to capture the veins sprawling across my chest. I’ve tried to draw, photograph, or trace them with my fingers long enough to commit their pathways to memory. Yet, no luck. The cloudy blue and muddy greens bookending each channel always pale into my pinky flesh. The softness of the delta never translates. Rivers are rigid and angular but pump flexibly here. In moments, they burst from my chest in vibrance, igniting their branches that grasp outward from my sternum to my nipples. The adornment clasps at the nape of my neck, embedded. 

They didn’t light up until I found myself with breasts that cast shadows. I had an immature body for a long while. Into my early months of being twenty, really. My hips were narrow. Chest was flat. The ribcage was skin stretched across bone as a series of rolling depressions.

Motivated by an attempt to embody a sense of contented presence in this curving case of organs, I periodically live undressed. I feel wider. A wave has formed from my ass tracing up my spine that is mirrored with the abdomen loaf rising from my frontside. An eye rolls from the back to the front seamlessly with onlooking — as seamless as minute curvature of bubbling fat accumulation allows. New crevices have formed along with valleys and rolls and soft pliable hills across my chest. A body with skin that slides down in an outward direction from the waist to loop around my hips and backside are new embodiments. I guess I am fleshy in the manner a fruit might be. There are dimples scattered irregularly, craters, punctures, holes with pathways to the next, secretions, and the bites you take have resistance. With every grab, there is registration. Redness blooms to the surface where any kneading, pulling, pressing, squeezing, biting, sucking, or scratching takes place. However, memory has housed this understanding long before I attempted the circulatory indexing. Some areas feel like leather. Veins scatter. Fuzz is all over. There’s ink I’ve selectively injected at the surface that never makes a straight line because I am without them. Not even my spine erects a path of precision.