Dear Identity Service Provider,

I am writing in response to your likely automated request to “recapture” my fingerprints. According to your process, there was an issue with the quality of my scan, but in reality, my hand went unrecognized by your standards for existence, and your machine operator fainted during a call for help with their supervisor during my first appointment, hit their head on a vacuum, and defecated in their pants.

Dozens of your error codes had rejected the best possible capture of my right hand for upward of an hour, complaining of “unequal segment dimensions.” To satisfy your need for symmetry required the painful repeated repositioning of fingers I no longer possess— neither in whole nor in part— while your machine operator and I grew equally lightheaded.

You can manually deselect any fingers the applicant is totally missing, the supervisor explained over speakerphone.

Just before the machine operator’s legs gave out, I watched the left side of their body lean into the void of your impossible expectations, and my own spirit drifting out of the room.

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A lover of mine once rose naked from bed and said, “I thought you had more burns.”

I was already on my feet, searching for my panties. What I heard was a neutral expression of surprise, but the bones in my back went stiff. For a moment I’d forgotten the fire that nearly took my life when I was a teenager, and although I’ve been writing about it ever since, I found myself wholly unprepared to discuss the ratio of my scars to the skin I was born with.

Bent over, I stared at the floor, not breathing for what felt like a long time.

Years ago, on a playhouse stage, a fellow actor’s gun was supposed to fire at me in the middle of my line, “Help! He’s trying to kill—” and the trigger failed to operate. I couldn’t die as planned, synchronizing my collapse with the sound of the make-believe bullet. Instead, my sudden speechlessness made zero sense, and my knees— poised as they were for the hard and fast drop I’d rehearsed night after night— merely wobbled. The lights on my face grew hotter as my feigned horror gave way to a real one: my heavy torso hung midair as if for eternity, waiting for my partner’s cue.

Eventually, a loud pop released me from that limbo.

Probably one second passed before I shot upright, turning my panties inside out, and joked, “I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you.”

Lover tossed their hands, dropping a cigarette they meant to light, and replied:

“Pssht, nah. I mean… it’s not like I’m into that sort of thing.”

(Inside one of their nostrils, a trace of dried blood reminded me of how they’d rushed forward to lift and throw me down onto their bed, and my palm reflexively struck their face, triggering an almost theatrical cascade of red.)

I smiled and said, “It’d be okay if you were.”

There isn’t yet a name for the type of person who feels sexual attraction toward Severe Burn Survivors, but if there was, it might make telling this story of my longing easier.

As of this week, I have been studying the art of belly dance for a year. One of my instructors is planning a student showcase on the seventh of June, and I’m determined to debut a solo performance. For the flyer she wants to call her students “Golden Embers” because we are extensions of the metaphorical fire she sees herself stoking through the sharing of her knowledge, but she worries that it sounds too cheesy. I would hijack her term here.

Calling all Golden Embers! Help me spread this unspeakable heat.

Just kidding. This one goes out to my fellow Severe Burn Survivors. Especially that one I met in a peer support group last year who asked everyone in attendance whether we still have sex.

I haven’t returned to that lover since, even though I remember well what it was like, as a teenager, to wonder whether anyone would ever touch me again because of my burns.

I wish I could’ve reacted to their surprise slower, that I might’ve harnessed the clarity of mind to ask if they’d be willing to share more. How was it for them to learn that I was less burned than they’d imagined? If not disappointing, was it relieving? What meaning did they make of my nudity subverting their expectations? Of the fact that they had just sex with a Severe Burn Survivor?

It occurs to me now that I care more about the meaning I make of my lover’s surprise. Why have I associated the pause their words gave me with the memory of a pretend-gun that fired too late?

In both scenarios, I was performing the role of a victim. For two decades and counting, I’ve been striving to rewrite a socially conditioned script that leaves no room for empowerment: “Being burned makes you ugly.” (It’s hard to place where I first encountered and internalized this stigma, but I keep returning to one scene in Girl, Interrupted where Polly, a burn survivor, stands at a window, forlorn, watching Susanna leave the hospital for a date with a man. Later, Polly throws a fit in her room, screaming “My face! I’m ugly! My face!”).

Ugly is what I believed myself to be back at the children’s burns hospital, after the last of my bandages came unraveled, and I learned for the first time how much the fire had blanketed my Total Body Surface Area. That percentage was higher than I’d imagined.

To the audience of “Murdered to Death” it might have looked as though I made a critical mistake, forgot my final line as Dorothy Foxton. But truly, it was my greatest display of acting to date. I didn’t fall before the gun resounded, although by then I probably should have. The rhythm of the blocking was practically seared into my nerves after weeks of rehearsal.

Instead of dying the same old death I had essentially perfected, I remained in that moment alive and open to the unexpected. For once, my nervous system did not respond to a potential threat without my consent. I waited, and inside that waiting, I not only found an opportunity to place a little trust in my scene partner, but also what it means to truly be present.

I want to get better at this, and redefining sexy for myself. It’s one reason I’ve chosen to study belly dancing.

My other instructor advises me to keep my arms close to my side. This draw their eyes to your hips, she explains. I do what she says. She’s unfathomably hot. Besides, I’m learning a lot.

Still, I would keep my arms wide enough so that, were I to unexpectedly fall into the arms of a new lover, I would have a stronger chance at maintaining my center of gravity.

I confess I am afraid of heights, and sometimes, being held.