Oh hi, here’s your 5lights delivery sent a day late and a paragraph short, all courtesy of the Too Real But Cmon It’s Fiction Express:
“I wonder what it would be like to be not particularly pretty. Passable, you know?” Halfway through my point, I realize it isn’t something you can say out loud, so I look out the window, bite the edge of my straw, wait.
“Like me,” she says, in between stabs at her salad.
“Yes, exactly,” I think, with that part of me that hopes to, one day, be forgiven. I touch her hand and furrow my brow and tell myself that one I’ll go to therapy and be able to say things like, I’m not coming to lunch because I’m not in the mood. But for now I twist my finger through my ponytail and avoid looking back at her and summon every ounce of energy, every bit of me that knows how to lie, and drain it all into my gut and out of my mouth, “”No-oooo!”
“No, why would I say that to you if I thought you were that? You know how hot you are.”
“Awwww!” she beams. This, it seems, was all she wanted from me. How often, I worry, are we a stand-in, a warm body to sit next to at brunch? I can’t think about that for too long before wondering if she is the same thing to me— the type of woman you can’t sit across from at a table and look straight in the face.
We are inauthentic, as my yoga teacher would say.
“What would that be like?” she says, always game to jump on board with my moods. Maybe this is why I keep her around, to test out the limits of social interaction.
“I don’t know,” I shrug and shake my head. Once she says it I want to disavow it, but I know I can’t take it that far, so I stutter on, “I mean, I know I’m not hot or anything, but I know I’m pretty,” I shrug and I sigh and I wiggle, but she nods and I go on, “I know I can be…beautiful. Not always, and not to everyone, but I can be. Sometimes. And I know that.” It is hard to answer at first but her approval goads me on, into a different part of myself, a hallway, maybe, where I am unafraid to be threatening because I know I will be anyway, where I both love and hate myself the easy way: in extremes. “But other girls, some girls, you see them trying desperately to be special, to be interesting. I just can’t imagine being that, un-compelling.” I dare myself to look at her but my voice trails out the window. We are no longer having anything resembling a conversation. It is an interesting place to be.
Always with her, if not because of her, I come to terms with the limitations of my own femininity. As much as we joke and we affirm each other, almost comically, there is a dread. A worry that maybe I can’t, won’t be able to, look a man in the eyes and slay him. Maybe I won’t be able to do it the way I imagine in my head.
by Meaghan O’Connell
