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You look into the mirror, scrutinizing every pore, every line, every wrinkle. You used to be the prom queen, the head cheerleader, the queen bee, the prettiest girl in school. Now, you’re just another old woman, another nobody, with huge, gaping pores and long, spidery wrinkles.
You forgot that aging claims the best of us. You forgot, it’s the geeks and the freaks that grow up to be successful, smart, pretty in their own right. Loved, cherished. Appreciated. You forgot that even the shiniest trophy wife will eventually tarnish.
You married the high school jock, the captain of the football team. Back then he was tall, fit, tan and handsome. Now, his muscles have morphed into soggy lumps of fat, his face turning in on itself like a piggy portrait of someone that was forced to become something he didn’t want to be. God knows you didn’t marry him for his brains. His seemingly endless supply of cash had gone bone dry, a bowl of water in the middle of the desert. Like his open mouth when you sleep next to him at night.
And now you sit here, in front of a grubby mirror in a gas station restroom, cursing to yourself for spending too much time in the sun as a teenager. You pop a zit onto the mirror, oblivious to the thin stream of juice now running down your chin. You lick your lips, chapped and burning, for comfort.
Then you pull your gun out.
At this point, you’re probably wondering how cliché this whole thing can get. Oh, poor you, all alone and ugly in a gas station restroom. There’s no possible way that anyone can have it any worse than you do, that anyone’s life could be as cruddy as yours.
Well, you could always be missing both legs. That’s what your no-good husband always told you when he thought you had complained too much. He could always give you something to really complain about, if you really wanted to complain.
It wasn’t always this way, though. You remember high school: being the head cheerleader, and thus, skinny as a pole, twice as pretty, and half as smart; the leader of your little group of Barbie-doll clones; and the prom queen, gorgeous in the slim, skin-tight gown you bought from an expensive magazine.
Oh, but dear you, you should’ve saved the money you spent on that dress and bleaching your hair for when you had a lazy husband and no job. What good is that dress now, with you getting old and fat and with it getting more and more out-of-fashion? What good is more bleach for hair that’s already fried beyond repair? What kind of person are you trying to impress?
The real question is, what kind of person aren’t you trying to impress?
Flash back to before the stretch marks snaked their way across your swollen belly, before the dark circles were permanently etched beneath your dull eyes. Go back to when your now-sallow complexion was as sun-baked as you could get it without peeling off the outer layers. Go back to when your posture was tall and proud, the hunch in your back nothing but a distant future. Go back to when you were pretty.
If you can even think back that far.
Try to remember what it was like when the whole world had its eyes on you, watching your every move, anticipating every misstep and gracefully helping you recover.
Come on, you can try.
Or just pull the mask back over your face.
“I’ll love you so long as you’re beautiful,” he said to you back then, both of you assuming that it meant “forever.” He eventually began to eat his words, along with way too much cholesterol and saturated fats. His poor, tiny arteries are choked to the brim with plaque. It wouldn’t surprise anyone if a doctor pulled an entire chicken wing out of his bloodstream. And it wouldn’t surprise anyone if he keeled over in the next twenty minutes.
His time is tick, tick, ticking away, perfectly in-time with your biological clock.
God knows you tried to have kids. For six years after you were married, and even a few years before, the two of you had endlessly attempted to conceive a child, to pass along your perfect pretty genes and wonderful personalities to a beautiful child. A little boy with golden curls, or a little girl with thick, straight hair. Neither ever showed up.
Now he won’t even look at you without sighing with disgust.
 Moire Frost · Sun Jan 03, 2010 @ 05:21am · 0 Comments |
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