Beauty and the Beast

Unsurprisingly, this is a post on beauty; and Beauty and I have a rather strained relationship.

I can be beautiful, I know that - I can make myself so, I can pull myself together, I can focus my mind and I can seem that way to others, if I just focus enough, if I'm having a good day.

Beauty is an effort I make, a mask I put on, but it is not my natural state.

I feel like a monster underneath, hideous, inappropriate, crudely sensual in all its repulsive glory and glorious repulsiveness.

I feel that if I'm not careful, if I relaxed too much, that natural state would come through, would break its way out to the exterior.

I feel that sometimes, when I don't look into a mirror for a while, my features begin to shift without my constant scrutiny - the edges sharpened and the angles blunted, the brows protruding and the chin receding, the eyes sinking deep into their sockets - and then, when by chance I catch a glimpse of myself in a darkened window after nightfall, I look like a Gargoyle, I have turned into something dangerously close to what nature intended me to be.

It's in my body and my mind - the monster is inside, but it would also be outside if it got even the slightest chance.

My body seems to be straining, constantly, to transform itself into that monstrous form against my desperate and ever-more-exhausted attempts to restrain it.

My limbs, my fingers, my feet, seem straining constantly to develop in a crude and gangly fashion, to stand off at odd angles and curl up into themselves, my joints are straining to grow gnarly and repulsively swollen, my back is straining beyond belief to arch itself into a hunched and croony form.

My skin is straining constantly to break out into festering pustules and ulcerous pimples all over my body, to grow hair that will cover me whole, to hold on to any kind of filth and stain that might come its way.

My flesh is straining to expand, to break out in masses of fatty tissue obscuring the form of my skeletal frame underneath.

That would be me, I feel, if I wasn't careful, if I didn't take any pains to hide it - a monster, winged and horned, with huge gluttonous lips smacking in delight over a greasy, pimpled chin.

And every day I try to make believe, I bathe, I shower, I scrub, I shave, I run, I restrict, I clean, I push; I do my hair and I treat my skin, I cover with makeup any pimples or redness, I dress my body to hide the fat that is pushing to the surface, I push my body to its limit in order to burn it, I paint my lashes, adorn myself with jewelry and a false smile, I open my eyes wide and I purse my lips in an appealing fashion.

I do everything to hold onto the last vestiges of self-control, to become prim and proper and clean and neat and pretty, everything that society smiles upon and would wish a human being to be.

While in truth - I am meant to be a monster, I am fit to live in a cave and scare away small children with my unashamed hideousness; heck, I am probably fit to eat them.

I don't want to feel like this all the time, on the verge of breaking into ugliness befitting a creature of gruesome legend, of gluttony and hideousness meant to be cited in cautionary tales.

I don't want to go through the motions everyday, straining to make myself appear as if I had any business at all in the realm of beauty.

Still I do, because the alternative seems ever more terrible, and I am not ready yet to let the Beast win - despite the monstrosity that I feel underneath, I am not willing to give up on beauty.