On Beauty

The razor scores its lines of bareness up my legs, grazing where the soap has rinsed off. Tweezers leave my brows neat and pink and sore. Concealer doesn’t quite cover anything. My hair hangs in dry tresses like bushels of hay; the brush shreds through it like a thresher.  Nails break and dry skin flakes and that’s going to scar, and where did that bruise come from? Mascara’d eyes water. Are my teeth white enough? This shirt is creased. These jeans are dirty. And tighter.  Have I put on weight? Am I ugly? 

Beauty is tiresome. We bend and bend to ideals until our backs break like split ends. With hot wax we tear off layer after layer of our integrity. We wax and wane in cycles of gluttony and starvation. We reward and punish. We tint and bleach. Wrap ourselves around curling irons, and little fingers. We perform for the crowd like dancing bears, stripped bare of hair and dignity. We fear your gaze; we also yearn for it.

Beauty is that which we incessantly seek. Beauty is the Goddess to whom we all prostrate ourselves, to whom we offer sacrifices of silver pieces and our souls. Beauty is the glorious light to which we turn our faces, to which we are drawn like drab moths. And what does it give us in return? Skin cancer and singed edges. Self-hatred and subjugation. 

Sometimes I just want to stop. I don't want to strive for beauty any more. I do not want to be beautiful. I only want to be a vessel for it. I want to fill myself up with beauty. Like the sun pouring in through a window and filling a room with light. Fill my eyes with beautiful sights, my ears with beautiful music, my nostrils with the most beautiful scents. I want to think only the most beautiful thoughts. When I open my mouth, I want nothing but beauty to come out. And when I dream at night I want the darkness inside me to be vanquished by beauty. 

What a beautiful thought! Let us smash all the mirrors and use the pieces to make beautiful mirror balls to dance our beautiful dances to beautiful sounds! Let us take our lipsticks and paint white walls with beautiful pictures! 

If only. My ugliness is ingrained far too deeply; it lurks in my ventricles like dark silt in a brackish lake.   I'm going to go and wash it out with Neutrogena grapefruit face scrub, and gently smooth on make up,  layer after layer, until you can't even see its traces.