They shine at 35, a veritable summer solstice of bone mass. After which point they decline, wither into dusk and the impending winter. Bones are not built to last. And it doesn't help that the very DNA that creates them also breaks them down. Unlike Rilke's angels who "serenely disdain to annihilate us," a chemical in our DNA decimates without hesitation. Year after year, we wear the scars (wrinkles, poor eyesight) as our body slowly eats itself. Without this chemical, however, could bones forever support us?
A forensic anthropologist can identify your age, sex, and (sometimes) your race just by observing signature bones. American Indians carry a unique gene that produces an extra ridge on the tongue-side of some of their teeth; hip bones of adult women are wider and have a more pronounced curve around the ishio pubis. Osteoporosis, polio, bad diet: all can be gleaned from as little as a mandible. If our living faces are televisions broadcasting our interpretation of the world right now, then our bones are time capsules: calcified sponges of facts into which we encode messages--indicators of who we were and how we lived--for the future. Not quite as quick or Wellsian as sending yourself a decade-delayed email, but enough to say "I was an 18-year-old, American Indian woman"; "I survived another trepanning"; "I drank too much Coke." Bones mumble on to whomever listens until, patiently, they turn to stone; their voices reduced: eerie truths whispered among the clamour of flesh. They linger like picture frames sold on the side of the road: the painting gone, the skeleton appears naked and new, catching the light like teeth petrified and smiling.
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