I love my “well lived-in body.”

A kitchen table that has been used for thirty years has burns from a pan somebody put down too fast, a ring from a glass at a party, and a dent where a child once brought down a toy hammer. Nobody sands it back. The marks are the reason it stays in the family.

Bodies collect a similar record and then get graded on an entirely different scale — against a surface that has never been used for anything.

The knees that have taken you up a hundred thousand stairs. The hands with a scar from a job you no longer do. It isn't a decline from a better version. It is a table with thirty years on it.