I remember what it was like to become pretty.
I opened up, became visible. People begin to try to meet my eyes, to push back the soft hair that separated me from them. They asked my name and spoke it back to me like it was a gift. My shyness was now an endearing thing. It made me supple, enticing, something precious that could be peeled back and enjoyed.
They invited me out for coffee, drinks, to go to the gym, to go back to their apartment at 10 P.M. for a study sessions. Invitations that were once silence. My jokes were funnier, and my wit was wittier and even the ways in which I was uncomfortable and inchoate people found endearing.
I still cried on the floor of my dorm room most days, but in between rolling storms of self-hatred, power outages of miserable pulsing depression, there were moments that I thought I was becoming someone special. That I was stepping into the outline of a skin worth pumping blood through.
That I was becoming someone who deserved to be loved.
There are people who will tell you that beauty doesn’t matter.
They don’t understand: it is everything.
It is in the fine lines of our architecture and the polish of our weapons and in every magazine, movie, advertisement. It is in the shape of perfume bottles, in fine art, in the taper of clothing, in linen, in the arrangement of food on a child’s plate. It is in the design of our dreams and the matrix of hope.
It is the moment the woman bites the man’s lip like an animal and he grabs her hips and pulls her back to stare at the way her adrenaline makes her neck pulse. And together they throb in such a way that even the trail of blood running down his chin is beautiful, so that even the pain gives them a new and elegant shape.
The first time a boy saw me naked we were in the woods at 2 A.M and I remembered the chill when I lifted the shirt up from my belly, the hairs on my arms pricking up, the crunch of leaves and sticky burrs against my shoes. He called me a goddess and held me, rocking back and forth. He said my full name. Autumn Christian. He said, I am here with Autumn Christian.
It was the way people said my name when they knew me primarily from my writing. Like a symbol, heat-singed.
When I became pretty, I remembered becoming real.
And I didn’t want to go back.
Every time I looked into the mirror and saw something hideous, I felt like the flow of time was going backwards. Or like, I was being thrust into cryogenic sleep and I could not awaken, and move forward with my life, until in my paralysed dreams, I’d scraped the ugliness off of myself.
Sometimes people will laugh at me when I refuse to put creamer into my coffee or won’t take a piece of cake. Maybe it is because they haven’t known what it’s like to pull yourself out of ugliness and self-isolation and feel the freedom and weightlessness of every lost pound like you are untying wings. To feel the throbbing ugly core of your being that has controlled so much of your actions, loosen its grip just a little with “No, I don’t want to eat that.”
It’s the freedom that I give myself.
As long as I own a body, it’s beauty, or lack of it, gives it definition. The body carries the brain. It cannot help but be influenced by the skin and nerves and blood and the eyes that bite its fingers, and the hands that push back the hair from my neck, and the voice, soft, “Did you know your skin tastes like sugar?”
I may be a writer, but it’s the body that people interact with - not the words tripping around in my head.
I’d like to say that there’s a spiritual sort of ending to this writing. That I learned that beauty doesn’t matter, only confidence in the self does, and that as long as I found myself beautiful, it doesn’t matter what anyone else think.
But I’m too smart to not see the patterns right in front of me.
I can’t help but see how being pretty opens up opportunities, or denies them. I can’t stop seeing how your physical presence shapes the way that others interact with you, how they hold you affixed in your mind. I can’t stop seeing how the world smiles brighter at you, when you have all your teeth, and your skin glows, and your waist is small enough for a boy to nearly put his hands all the way around.
I don’t know if I can can ever pay enough recompense to stop paying attention to just how much my physical appearance affects everything around me. How the appearance of everything affects everything itself - because the look of a thing is not just a covering to deceive us. It is its operations, its functions, and its soul.
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Self portraits by me canon t51
Some of my other posts you may be interested in:
Notes For A Young Horror Writer [Writer's Journal]
[Short Story] Job Requirements For The Destroyer of Worlds
What Separates A Good Writer From An Excellent One?
The Things You Love Will Find Their Way Back To You [Writer's Journal]
[Poem] I Think One Day You Will Disappear