Deliciously Beautiful

When I was a little girl, I would pray to God that I would wake up the next morning with long hair and banana cream skin and those ocean eyes people sang about. I gave myself over to perms and I wish it straightened out my thoughts the way it straightened out my hair. My coffee-skinned girlfriends wanted milk-skinned boyfriends so they could create a latte-colored offspring. The world was my teacher and I learned to denounce my darkness, my hot comb burned scalp, my crooked teeth and my desire to be wanted.

It stands to reason that I have a crippling need to be constantly validated. Perhaps that is why I was so desperate for someone, anyone, to give me love. I thought that's what every 12- or 14-year-old girl was supposed to want. And for a time, I did. I just didn't want it from boys 4 times my age. I suppose when you're thought to be nothing more than mud beneath someone's shoe, you can't be choosy. Some might say I had a lot of nerve to be ugly with such high standards. It was nothing personal, I just remember feeling like a god. Some days, I still do. Only now, deep down, it lingers; the hatred for myself I pretend I don't carry.

If my father got one thing right about me, it's that I was an attention whore. I wanted boys my age to touch me the way grown men did. I wanted boys my age to kiss me the way grown men did. And I wanted boys to like me the way grown men did. I was young and simple-minded and wanted to fit in. I just wish I was smart enough to take comfort in solitude rather than Keeping Up with The Jones'.

From one human being to another, let this be your warning not to give up your power. Do not let others be the one to make or break you. We are fragile and we hope and we are small and we are stupid and we are mortal and we are lied to and through all of that, we love. God, do we love. That is why we are so paper thin. When you give up too much of yourself, you find it easier to live in someone else's flesh. You will search for missing parts of yourself in them, you will rip them open by the seams, you will tuck yourself into the folds of their muscles and tangle yourself in their nerves and the blood will make it messy, but fuck. There is an unexplainable peace in being whole, even if it means sucking someone else dry. It's shameful, it's delusional, it's madness, and we are taught that it is sinfully sweet to martyr ourselves for the sake of companionship. It's everything you want except for what you need.

Some twenty-something years later, I reached for my phone to ready myself for my hourly ritual of social media consumption. I suppose this is what my thumb was made for; flicking through every app it can reach and showing me lives I only knew a fraction of, but still wished were mine. Social media, I learned, is just an endless digital buffet of useless junk designed to make my brain feel more and more like tar that can't solidify.

With a magic tap of my finger, your face pops up on my screen. I see your perfect little blog, with your perfect, slender fingers and even more perfectly coated crimson nails. Your perfect smile on your perfect rose colored lips. I wonder if you could give me the perfect kiss, if I asked kindly. One hundred different scenarios run through my peanut sized brain on how I can have the life you do. But if I'm being honest, I didn't care too much about living your life more than I cared about wanting to eat it.

I wanted to savor you and digest you and scrape you off my plate. I wanted my fist full of your perfect hair and your tender flesh between my rotten teeth. I imagined wiping you off my chin and washing you down with fruitful wine and felt myself becoming you. I hoped that in consuming more perfect women, that I too would become "perfect". I, too, still dream of becoming deliciously beautiful. Deliciously beautiful. What is it like to be so small and ever so consumable?

How funny is it that we can love a certain type of life, but hate who lives it? How easy would it all be if we could reset our lives the way you could reset your password? To have as many new lives as I want, as many times as I need, as many do-overs as I command. What could I lose more than the ability to accept all responsibility? And how blissful would that be, to believe that there is no responsibility to accept?

I wanted it all. Power, beauty and more. I tried to be quiet about it. I tried to shrink myself and simply watch from the sidelines. I thought I would be satisfied with just a taste, but I need more. I need the full meal, the whole body, bones and all. It's feral, really. It's obsessive and I struggle to contain it.

I must contain it.

In my devotion to the arts, I dare to walk the fine line of uncertainty that is creating something digestible and something that is worth choking on. I suffer for the sake of art, and honestly, I implore you to name an act more intimate, more symbolic, than eating all you desire?

Perhaps in a past life I was a cannibal. How close am I to reliving that same lifestyle for a second lifetime?