Sometimes in the mornings I stare at myself in the mirror. It isn’t vanity that drives this, as I sit there picking apart all the scars on my skin, how my teeth are never white like other peoples, how the shape of my face is wrong, how my stomach has grown, how thin my hair is getting, chanting all the ways that no one could love this body.
I don’t like standing close to people because I know the work I do is mostly manual labor and nine times out of ten I’m covered in sweat that’s probably soured. I don’t like talking in intimate spaces because I don’t have dental insurance and I’m sure my breath is less than pleasant. I have, in my mind, a thousand different reasons why I’ll end up alone at any given moment.
My anxiety is getting worse as I get older.
I’m sure I frustrate people with constant mantras of the things I get right, of things I’ve accomplished. I’m sure I frustrate people when they see how self depricating I get even in the light of those accomplishments.
And I always seem to be in the shower when I have panic attacks.
I’ve wondered for a long time why I started hating my body. I never used to. I wondered if it was because I no longer had anyone appreciating it for its beauty. But I get hit on every time I walk into the local gay bar, I’ve been taken home by a married couple for a birthday celebration.
I still don’t find myself attractive.
So I sit there at night, self in hand, searching through databases of porn looking for those few videos and pictures where you can see love passing between them and longing and pleasuring myself to that fantasy. Searching for that moment in everything that makes everything seem right again. To forgive that my room hasn’t been clean in half a year, to forgive that I keep spending my money on food I shouldn’t buy to give myself an excuse to leave the house, to forgive the fact that I just can’t seem to make it work.
And then there’s le petite mort.
And then everything is as it was.
I’m standing in the mirror again, poking at stretch marks and asking if anyone could ever love them.
