FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

What You Are
By Alexis Wiggins

You are beautiful. People look at you in shopping malls, on subway station escalators, on the corner of Seventh and West 4th. Men catch your eye and hold it, as if lasers could reach from pupil to pupil across the room and radiate a message: come home with me, or, sometimes: let me love you. Women never look you in the eye; they look you up and down, a two-second glance during which they drink in your suede boots or pointy-toed flats, your smart pant-suit, size 4, or little black dress and cashmere cardigan, your hair pulled back and clipped, emphasizing high cheekbones that have the faintest color of a late summer sunset, or hair down, framing your face with dirty blond wisps. Their eyes are not lasers, but quick explosions of envy, comparing and competing, like a camera's white flash in the dark.

You are beautiful. You have been told this for as long as you can remember, even on the third day of your life, when you sat in your mother's sad arms in the hospital lobby for your father to pick you both up, late as usual. An old woman leaned over and told your mother that you were beautiful, a beautiful baby with eyes the color of blueberries. You were told every birthday, when you had a bowl-cut and bigger, blue-green eyes and wore the dresses your grandmother made you, with knee socks and mary-janes, and opened presents, feigning surprise that you were good enough to deserve so many. You were told every Thanksgiving, especially the one in New York when you wore the long black dress and heels and people who saw pictures of it later told your other grandmother you were gorgeous, a beautiful genetic extension of her. You were told every Christmas, even the one when you had your head shaved, hoping to finally be anonymous, average, ugly, hoping to avoid that word, but people still called you it, said only you could pull it off with that face.

Beautiful, you are so beautiful, and you could be a model and you should model it's good money and you really have the face and body for it, though you could be taller, too bad you aren't a little taller, but you are quite stunning and have you seen my granddaughter's wedding picture isn't she beautiful smart too look at those eyes and yes she is a little skinny but she looks great in the dress doesn't she? Have you met my daughter oh thank you yes she is beautiful she takes after her father's side no no we don't really look alike I was never so beautiful oh thank you thank you no I don't think she even knows how beautiful she is she has no idea the power she has over men she just doesn't see it or chooses not to thank you thank you we are very proud of her.

When you stare into cameras, any camera, you can't deny that you tilt your head down, eyes level with the lens, and smile in the way that you practiced so many times alone, in college, in front of the mirror. You can't deny that.

You know you are beautiful, know it when your girlfriends help you dress on your wedding day, watch you slip into your silk gown, and you can see the jealousy on their faces even though they love you, and even though they love you, you can see they are jealous of you, and even though they are jealous of you, you feel silly and stupid and sometimes fat and when you imagine yourself you still think of the twelve-year-old you, knock-kneed and stick thin, breasts only a fantasy, years away, head too big for your body, and people would say then: She will be gorgeous when she grows up, and you would shrink into yourself at the shame of being publicly discussed, but secretly you loved it, like a drug.

Oh, you are fucking beautiful, standing before the bathroom mirror, naked and shivering, staring at yourself, your wide blue-green eyes, your blank face, your small breasts, your ribs like the sand at low tide. You examine it all, sucking in your cheeks, pulling back your hair, turning your head from side to side to check which profile is better. Sometimes you just stare into your own eyes for so long you are convinced there is nothing there, convinced of something so black and frightening and bottomless that you have to stop, to look away, to get dressed and pretend that it doesn't matter, that there are far more important things. Sometimes, you see nothing but a woman's square face and big eyes and you swear -- you swear -- you can't find anything different in your face than anyone else's. You see yourself as average. You really mean this, but when you try to tell people, they tell you to give them a break. You don't bother to say that you aren't fishing for compliments, that you really do mean it. You can see they don't care.

Beautiful. You hear the word in your head like a scream, like the only thing you know how to be, the secret to your self-esteem, the dirty trick they all played on you, the three syllables you need to hear from everyone you meet in order to feel like somebody, somebody who matters, the three syllables you need to hear from every man before you can chew him up and spit him out and feel truly sorry but not know how else to be because you are beautiful. Beautiful people like you are never satisfied, and your beauty is as soft and loving as a razor.

You are beautiful. People look at you in shopping malls, on subway station escalators, on the corner of Seventh and West 4th. Men catch your eye and hold it, as if lasers could reach from pupil to pupil across the room and radiate a message: come home with me, or, sometimes: let me love you. Women never look you in the eye; they look you up and down. You look at you: in the reflection of a store-front's glass on the way to work; in a friend's sunglasses; in the foyer mirror before leaving to go grocery shopping. And what do you hope to see when you look, when you catch yourself there in the glass, the lenses, the mirror? You hope to see nothing at all but your face, a silent face that merely needs a bit more sleep or chapstick, you hope to see only that, but you never do, you can never see such stark silence. What you see is a face that is loud, hysterical, screaming until it's raw and hoarse, screaming that word over and over again, asking it in the form of a question, already knowing the answer: That beautiful is like the old flash bulbs from your first Kodak camera, the cartridge ones that clipped into the top. With each picture taken, one of the bulbs blazed, popped, and frosted over, like exploded stars, or cataracts. The flashes were bright but they had no warmth, and only the image, seared into the film, was left as proof that you ever even existed. That you were beautiful.

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