Skin
When I die, keep my skin.
Don’t mummify it or attempt taxidermy; it shouldn’t be gross. Remove it carefully by slicing it in long, gentle strokes; peel it off as delicately as gold leaf, treat it with the best preservatives money can buy, and display it, empty and alone, in a glass box. I imagine it freestanding in three dimensions with invisible steel wires, nearly intact from the back, but opened from the heart down. It should be relaxed, arms raised slightly, hands forward, a suggestion of the form it was once bound to. I definitely want my tattoos visible: tattoos are often erroneously said to “last forever” when, in reality, they are as temporary and delicate as the body they live on. Mine will truly last forever, along with whatever other scars, cancers, amputations, wrinkles, or burns move in next to them between now and my death. I think my family (whoever that is, when the time comes) should keep it for a while, showing it off at parties to scare squeamish friends. Use the glass box as a coffee table or bookshelf or paperweight (it’s going to take up quite a bit of space, so it should be useful). Let my skin live with those people for a couple of generations until I am so long gone that no one on earth even remembers my name and what’s left of me is now just a stranger taking up space in somebody’s house. It should then be pawned off, or lost in a bet, or sold to a traveling freak show. Unattached to my identity, crowds of people will gawk at what’s left of me and speculate as to whether or not it’s even real. Eventually, the novelty will wear off, and the owners will put it away to bring out something fresher and more entertaining, and it will get locked in a warehouse or a basement and forgotten about. One day, some person will stumble upon it doing some kind of other thankless task at work, realize what it is, and gleefully sell it to a museum. I think I’d want it to be in the MET (ambitious, I know: there’s currently no tattoo artists’ work represented there, and I would be honored to donate my own canvas to that space, even if I am not the first by the time the box is sold). Researchers will comb through historical records to figure out who I was so that they can place a blurb about my life next to the box, along with a list of any artist, doctor, or surgeon that ever altered my body. I think it should be in the center of a brightly lit room, low to the ground so that people can see it from above, and easily crowded on all sides by academics, families, retirees, students, donors, and the like, looking beyond the novelty of seeing cold human skin by itself and admiring, understanding, and seeing what’s left of me as art.
Aaron Lunan is a queer writer and educator in New York.