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IS IT TRUE THAT WE are more or less the same on the inside? I don’t mean psychologically. I’m thinking of the vital organs, the stomach, heart, lungs, liver: of their placement and function, and the way that a surgeon making the cut thinks not of my body in particular but of a general body, depicted in cross section on some page of a medical school textbook. The heart from my body could be lifted and placed in yours, and this portion of myself that I had incubated would live on, pushing foreign blood through foreign channels. In the right container, it might never know the difference. At night I lie in bed and, though I can’t touch it or hold it in my hand, I feel my heart moving inside me, too small to fill the chest of an adult man, too large for the chest of a child. There was a newspaper article about a man in Russia who had been coughing up blood; an X-ray showed a mass in his chest with a spreading shape, rag edged. They thought it was cancer, but when they opened him up they found a six-inch fir tree embedded in his left lung.

Inside a body there is no light. A massed wetness pressing in on itself, shapes thrust against each other with no sense of where they are. They break in the crowding, come unmade. You put your hand to your stomach and press into the softness, trying to listen with your fingers for what’s gone wrong.

It’s no surprise, then, that we care most for our surfaces: they alone distinguish us from one another and are so fragile, the thickness of paper.

I WAS STANDING IN MY room in front of the mirror, peeling an orange. I cradled its exact weight in my palm, sinking a nail through the topmost layer. I dug a finger under its skin until I felt cool flesh, then I rooted that finger around and around. The rind tore with a soft, cottony sound, the peel one smooth, blunt piece trailing off the fist of the fruit. I slipped my contacts in and blinked at the mirror. Most mornings I barely resembled myself: it was like waking up with a stranger. When I caught a glimpse of my body, tangled and pale, it felt as if there were an intruder in my room. But as I dressed and put on makeup, touched the little tinted liquids to my skin and watched the hand in the mirror move alongside my own, I rebuilt my connection to the face that I took outside and pointed at those around me. My hand ripped a wad of pulp and pushed it through the space between my lips. Juice crawled down the side of my palm. Like the moon, my mouth in the mirror seemed to look a little bit different each day. It was summer, and the heat hadn’t yet tightened around our bodies, making us sticky and moist, trapping us in a suit we hated to wear.