Vicious Visage

The pretty face versus the ugly face, I am both, both are me, and they are both of a little emphatic in the big, curvy nose and the strange little eyes, and the freckles on the forehead, and the nice teeth, and lips of a kiwifruit. Some days these technical details make me sensual and hot, like hourglassed crying sculpture, and other days, they make me a monster, a freaky fish with tingling feet.

“You are better than me, because you are pretty. Whenever it is me, nobody talks to me, not even my own reflection,” the ugly face says in the mirror and, accordingly, nobody answers.

Instead, the pretty face writes a note the next day with his own tongue blood in the bath, as if a murder had occurred. But the only murder that had happened was a murder of feelings!

“You have to be patient. I am not all cracked up to be because sometimes I have to be sexy in the most disgusting of ways. Let me tell you a story that you probably vaguely remember, though it is important that you know of it…”

By then, the blood is out and the body of my own consciousness, the one that shelters my pretty face and my ugly face, has passed out. When I wake up, the face is the ugly one, the one that is so alone and the one that craves darkness and eats his own pillows, and slobbers instead of kiss.

“That is the ultimate dichotomy of myself, and by consequence, and by the nature of me seeing it aloud here in real life, all the men, and the women, and those in between and beyond, that I am both ugly and pretty. I am bound, bound by my own brain, blended, bastardized, battered, beatified. So I say, to my own reflection, though it will not say it back: I am pretty in my own way just like you are ugly in yours!”

The pretty face doesn’t answer which I don’t expect, so I wait in the toilet seat for any signs of fiber dominant effects, but also for the blood spilling. But when I wake up, barely conscious, I speak like a man who has learned to love, even though I haven’t, and has learned to be beautiful, but I am just merely pretty, like in a scale between 1–100, I would be 51 with a few extra points for knowing how to clean my smooth rhomboid ass with a yellow bar of soap.

In that stupor of genius thought, the pretty face finally speaks to the ugly face through the mirror, and there they both smile, one prettily and one uglily, at the other.

“You are indeed a worthy ugliness for which to live by,” I say in the pretty words. “Because no matter how much I try, even I feel ugly sometimes, and it is my zits, my fat, my flaky skin, y nose hairs that I am not a pale imitation of God, the weak permutation that He discarded in a jealous centennial rage, but something more akin to an experiment of billions. So easily forgotten, but so impregnated with meaning and solidarity. That I have given myself thanks to you!”

The ugly face cries too and looks horrid when doing so, but I am so touched by my own words that I hug the mirror tightly and cut my body in both spheres of existence. We talk of our feelings and light our hearts with warmth and compassion, like all humans should do, first with themselves proper, and then with anyone else.

“I know who you are and I still love you,” the ugly face says, and so it is, that I finally am okay with myself. And as for what everyone else will think, I will have to wait for another day…