For some time, I have been developing the conclusion that I am less beautiful than I used to be. I can’t source a clear before and after, a reason or timeline for the decline, only the unshakeable feeling of deterioration. My face appears ravaged in the mirror. Something is off about my haircut. All of my clothes feel like mistakes. I’ve spent late hours in mild states of derangement, putting off more important things by rifling through old photos of myself. I fixate on tiny details in my past selves, like the whiteness of my eyes or the shape of a curl, and feel an unnameable loss. The truth is that I’ve probably felt this way for well over a year. The phases of envy for some bygone appearance pile on top of one another; if only I’d known I hadn’t quite reached the bottom yet when I thought I had; my six-months-ago self covets the previous six-months-ago self and so on.
It’s true enough that I’d lost some interest in my appearance— having loosened my tight grip on the equation of my own beauty with personal value, the dogma I was raised with. Yet the uncomfortable side effect of looking in the mirror less and forgetting to take as many selfies and spending less time and money on “upkeep” or “improvement” is the nagging worry that I’ve been letting myself go.
I shared this lament with one of the few friends I knew could tolerate this boring brand of vanity by laughing at me. To be completely, truly, 100% honest with you, she said, squinting into my face in the barren sunlight of Fort Greene park, you look exactly the same as you always have. We’d seen each other’s faces in countless iterations over the four years we’d known each other, so often in the mirror of the bathroom we used to share, in various shades of heartbreak and intoxication and other ruins, through breakouts and 10-pound fluctuations, chops and buzzes. The newer factors of city pollution and nicotine use hadn’t yet desolated this familiarity. I’m just telling you you’re delusional.
I know. I do know.
Even so, neither of us could resist the idea of our nostalgic past as somehow better. We sat beneath the Prison Ship Martyr’s column, on a ledge above the crypt, and talked about running away. We decided there were specific gaps in sensation in the city: the sound of cicadas at night, the feeling of soft earth sinking under our feet, the rush of running with abandon in open space. So many times we’d fashioned the same fantasy: we’re sitting on a front porch somewhere in long skirts, the night air is humid, the sound of banjoes, mandolins. At some point, we were there, but we can’t remember when.
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