Vanity

Anonymous

Heavy is the way I look, heavy are others. I hate to call myself vain, I hate the word vain. It makes me think of a painting I saw in the fourth grade, in a small, frigid classroom. My legs bouncing in my seat and my arms covered in goose bumps. The window to my right open and letting in gusts of warm air. I had wanted to be outside, but had rather been subjected to this art class, to a teacher whose name was spelled Mrs. Riddle but pronounced Mrs. Ride- ell. A black background instead of white. A skeleton, sitting at a vanity, looking into the mirror. A reflection that doesn't exist. A moral: vanity kills.

I hate to call myself vain, I hate the word vain. It’s just that there’s a person I want to be, a person who happens to be handsome. Even now as I sit here and write this I cannot only write. People have to see me write. People have to think I look good while doing it. I will never be satisfied with myself. I have to be satisfied with everyone else, too.

I hate to call myself vain, I hate the word vain. And yet I can never seem to care about the dream more than I care about the way I look achieving it. I say it but I still do not understand it: At the end of the day, my hair and skin will be irrelevant, and at the end of many days, I will be underground with none of it left to care for.

Call me blinded, call me unconvinced. I am so vulgarly snipped and slit by my own cookie cutter of vanity that my will to work away from the mirror has been shredded to bits. And I continue on, worrying my lip and nipping at my cuticles and creasing my forehead and slowly decaying from my vanity which kills.