Divine

I would stare into my own eyes in the mirror at night, bright and glassy, buzzing with a kind of manic exhaustion, weeping and laughing in turns and at once as a bubbling stab of giddy heat would rise up from my crotch to my throat, carrying with it a deep and dizzying conviction that I was something more than beautiful or special, that I was harboring some sort of near-divinity that only I had the power to see. I would saunter naked through my room, or else in dresses and heels or binding my breasts and hiding my thick mass of hair under a baseball hat, electrifying an emptiness full of imagined admirers. And then, finally, I would drift off to sleep, drunk on myself. I would wake in the morning, hollow and hideous. I took a crass sort of pride in my acceptance of the fact that I was unattractive – I thought it helped make me self-sufficient. A boy might offer a pretty girl his jacket if she was cold; so I dressed too thinly for the weather, knowing no warmth would be offered, and thought it made me stronger to freeze. Whatever that thing was that would possess me alone at night, it never saw fit to visit me during the day, or among other people. Or at least not with any longevity. Sometimes, though, a bolt of it would rip through me, usually coming out of my mouth as a perfectly timed joke. But as brutal as the days were, as low of an opinion as a I had of myself, or as others made clear they had of me, there were still those rare nights, and a deep sense, often beyond my own conscious awareness, that all of these people were wrong about me, that what they perceived as ugly was just a beauty beyond their own limited comprehension. And that sense saved my life, and gave me the courage to go out into the world and reach for something. 

On the other hand, all this hard-won self-love in my youth left me with a certain stubborn bitterness I find very hard to shake. I’m mistrustful of love, even attraction. I never believe – or, rather, I’m never satisfied with – the way that someone loves me, the way that they find me attractive. You think I’m hot? Well, that’s easy for you to say, I am hot now. But what do you know about it? You didn’t have to work for it at all. You see my face. For years and years, I had to see beyond my face. I earned thinking I’m hot, and if I had to earn it, I don’t see why it gets to be so easy for YOU to think I’m hot. Who the fuck are you, anyway? 

Incidentally, I never get laid.