Conceit

In high school, I couldn't stomach the packed lunchroom, with its overwhelming odor of ground taco meat and pungently flowering adolescent bodies. Instead, I'd go out into the ninety-degree Mississippi midday, sit on the edge of a picnic table crowded with loud impervious black kids, and apply a ballpoint pen to my left arm. Over the course of the forty-five minute lunch period, that arm would sprout delicate curlicues, arabesques, symmetrical patterns, or amorphous blobs, depending on my mood and level of dedication. Very often, I'd bleed my pen dry. After half a day of scan-trons, motivational posters, gum-caked radiators, and sad wilted ferns in the main office, I needed to reclaim some small part of myself, to stake it in the name of beauty and artifice. Paper wouldn't do; I needed to feel the ink on my skin, and to wear that ink as one part defiance, one part mystical apotropaic shield protecting me from the numbing force of reality. Lately, I've been getting that same urge to scribble on my flesh -- although this time, not pseudo-henna tattoos on my hands, but intricate art nouveau orchids on my cheek, blossoming from apple to temple. Instead, I apply tasteful eyeliner, shadow, mascara, and, as a last resort to quell my teeth-gritting frustration, the occasional splash of glitter. The numbness presses into me, and I can't seem to find a good way to press back.

I spend a lot of time worrying that I will never be able to transcend this level of ornamental artisanship, to transfer those lines to a less ephemeral medium. So much of my personality demands defiant postures going hand-in-hand with raw self-expression, but that's the stuff of high school. If I could only learn to stop loving that dumb white girl with the ink-smeared arms and cabaret makeup. If only she could learn to embellish anything but herself.