Chapped Lips

It begins with a tug. The skin on your lips tightens, becomes dry, cracks. Then it splits open — sometimes barely visible, sometimes so deep it bleeds. You lick your lips, drink more, apply balm. But the cracks come back. Again and again. As if your lips want to show you something that sits deeper than dry air or missing moisture.

Medically, chapped lips are usually a matter of external factors — wind, cold, dehydration, vitamin deficiency. All of that is true. But it doesn't explain why some people are never affected even under the same conditions, while others suffer chronically from it. And it doesn't explain why the cracks often appear precisely when something is in motion internally — or precisely when nothing is moving at all.

Chapped lips are a crack that makes visible what you've long been sensing inside: a rift between the way you live and the way you could live.