The invisible barrier is apparent. I’m separated from the others, silently excluded from their interactions and conversations, their voices akin to the silence of white noise fading into the background. I am judged by the angles of my face and the scars on my skin. Their faces morphing into ones of grotesque disgust, as they share their opinions based entirely on their fast perusal of me. I am isolated quickly as I do not speak of the image that is I, and so based upon their critiquing of my appearance, they are the ones that create the image that is me, for they fear for the perfection of their exteriors to be rendered vile by the hands of one they deem of that status.
Unclean.
Dirty.
The rule is unspoken but the constant sounding of its words echo on the walls that barricade and surround me. At first I wondered what I had done or said but soon realised it was what I had looked like, and the fact that I had not spoken at all which had caused the savagery of lightning and the despondency of rain to massacre the faint bonds of friendship which I was unable to strengthen and the weak ties of attachments unravelled and unthreaded. I was left with remnants of destruction and solitude.
And then came the day of me.
My sight had cast upon the lustrous cover of a magazine that adorned the word perfection. But alongside it was a woman I deemed unworthy of such a title. As the artificially altered attributes that her face adorned were palpable to the sight of all. Is this why I am deemed an image of utter imperfection? Or is it that I am simply deemed a far less appealing image of perfection? And so I decided that as nobody possessed the aspect of perfection nobody could deem whose face bore such a thing or whose did not. We are all imperfect beings, but like the image of a glistening panel of glass stained with white remnants of what has come upon its existence, with nothing but a refurnishing of the limits of our minds and the boundaries of our sight, we all have the opportunity to see beauty and to be of it ourselves.