When you catalogue your body, you should first start with the obvious things. The scar on your chin from that time you slipped, crawling across the living room floor next to your dog. Remember how your mother held you as your father checked the wound? That flap of skin hanging down. And then the emergency room and the bright lights…you pretended you were sleeping, but really you were awake the whole time, feeling that tug, tug, tug, like when your great aunt taught you how to sew on that snowman ornament three Christmases ago. Seven stitches for your seven years.

The things that you used to be so embarrassed of: that big freckle on the palm of your right hand, the little bump on your lip that came from nowhere and never went away. Now you're an adult, and it seems so silly that you ever cared about those little things, but you know how it is when you're a kid. That chicken-pox scar in between your eyebrows that you never noticed until someone pointed it out. It was that kid who told you, your freshman year. He was the one whose dad invented something. Key cards for hotel rooms, right? That sounds right. Something about the magnetic strip.

Isn't that the way it always is? You never notice those things until someone tells you it's wrong. Remember when your sister told you your eyebrows looked like caterpillars? Then you plucked them so thin they were barely there at all. You found out you had a big chin when you read it in a note, remember? That note for the photographer. "De-emphasise chin." And that comment, you remember that. The one on that website. "She has a cowboy jaw." "Man hands, no offense." "BARF." You remember that one, don't you? Barf. Or that first time you read about yourself online, at the dawn of the internet as we know it. "She's the fattest one. Zero muscle tone. Last place."