Nude

For the longest time Piper stares at the mirror. She reckons she is the sort of person society ruefully labels as typical—she doesn’t have a symmetrical face, her skin isn’t milky nor akin to porcelain, her eyes are a muddy brown and her lashes are short, and once, while she was attempting to shape up her eyebrows, she nicked a small portion in the middle of the left one.

Her lips are chapped now. She fumbles around the dresser for a chapstick, her mind going through all sorts of thoughts on how she can be perfect, how she can be looked up to because people think she is pretty, and how she can walk into a room and have heads turned to her direction, like that girl in history class.

Piper honestly hates this compulsion to be flawless. She hates how, when she is in a crowd, she looks around and asks herself if there are people like her—discontented individuals who concern themselves of nothing else but physical improvement.

She pushes the glass door to the coffee shop she frequents when these psychological seizures get the better of her disposition. Earlier she chose to wear no make up in commemoration of her efforts to finally go with the flow of the superficial social order and be invisible. With only red pumps as the key piece of her otherwise monotonous outfit, she takes bleak steps to her usual table near the innermost corner of the café, where the lights are dim and the seats much more sunken.

“Just a cup of macchiato. I’m not really hungry,” says Piper as she pushes aside the menu the waiter handed her. She is lying, of course. It is already half past two and the only thing she has had since this morning was the leftover pasta from yesterday’s dinner. But she is getting chunkier and chunkier by the minute, so she has to hold back unless she wants to gain ten more pounds.

She folds her arms atop the tea table made of well-polished hickory, and watch as a number of people walk in and out of the café. A chirpy girl wearing a sundress the color of flax enters with two pretentious glitterati; although wearing much a simpler outfit, the sundress girl stands out more than the others. While her face is devoid of any maquillage, her features are fresh and striking, the kind you see embellishing clothing line ads.

Sundress takes a seat near the counter, the other two tailing behind her like ownerless puppies in desperate search of a home. The taller one clad in a neon green jumpsuit—Tacky, Piper thinks—takes out a compact and puckers her lips, slathering two coats of bright red lipstick. Piper stifles a laugh. Apparently, Neon Jumpsuit has been cutting art class.

The girl sitting on Sundress’ left side seems to be listening intently to Sundress’ monologue, though Piper has no idea whether she understands anything or not. The girl’s eyelids are so droopy, probably from too much eye shadow, that they make her look incredibly sleepy. On her feet are clogs that awkwardly mismatch her leather getup. Oftentimes, these robotic cronies of fashion prioritize appearance over comfort, which Piper was once guilty for but is currently trying to overcome.

I cannot judge these people, thinks Piper, because in the face of their idiocy, I am one of them. She is a crony, too, of the collective mindset, “I should be perfect.” She spends hours figuring out what to do with her face. To make it less humanly, more supermodel-like. She feels insecure in the presence of physically blessed girls. She spends on cosmetic products that go out of trend in less than three weeks. This overwhelming want consumes her so badly she can hardly feel the soul with which she was born. In the glass panes of the café, she looks at her idle reflection but doesn’t see herself. Instead she sees what media and social culture shaped her to be, a phony.

In the end, the journey to perfection only made her more human. 

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A/N: Fiction. Any resemblance to a person, place, thing or whatever is purely coincidental.