I have a photograph of myself at age seventeen, snapped on a street corner in a small mountain town. The day was gray. I had a yellow paisley scarf holding my hair away from my face but the wind picked up strands, blowing locks of slippery blonde hair around and forward. In the picture I am looking steadily away toward the mountains. My eyes are fixed on an unknown horizon and my expression is solemn.
I showed this picture to some friends and many commented that I did not look seventeen, but rather much younger. Someone reflexively used the word beautiful. The photograph is technically proficient.
I look at the image and remember that day, that month, that year. The photograph shows the gash where my eyelid was split open, but otherwise gives away no secrets. The scar is hard to make out in a black and white print.
I do not have an impartial perspective. I look at the picture and remember that the scar was actually red and purple, with small flecks of glass working their way up from the depths of a cut meticulously repaired by a plastic surgeon.
I look at the picture and remember what it felt like to have a fractured cheekbone, to lose my sense of smell and part of my hearing and the ability to track text on a page. I remember the fact that my jaw was dislocated along with most of my ideas. I remember the headaches that turned my world red, the rage and fear that surged through my mind every day. I remember that everything tasted like blood.
Beautiful? Not then, not ever. I had already survived cancer and learned to keep secrets. The damage to my face turned a confused seventeen year old girl permanently away from any interest in physical beauty. I wanted to hide the shredded nerves and muscles and splintered bones. The horror of the event did not show on my face because I didn’t let anything show on my face.
The picture sitting on my desk gives away none of this. The picture does not even reveal the fact that my arm was still, seven months after the accident, in a plaster cast stretching from my knuckles to my shoulder. Other photographs over the years occasionally capture a different expression, but for the most part I still have the same solemn face of that young girl.
I look beyond the people in my immediate surroundings toward a horizon that is never clear. Beautiful? No; damaged, and determined. The truth is that I am not attractive by the standards of a larger society or even of the subculture I am generally aligned with. The reasons go beyond the fact of my scars, because of course some people find the scars interesting.
Before you rush to tell me otherwise, I want to be very clear. I do not believe in the idea of beauty. I do not know any beautiful people. I have never experienced the transient physical compulsion of a crush. I see everyone the way I see myself, as a complicated array of problems and secrets.
I wear what I like, eat what I like, go where I like, do what I like. I don’t care one bit what anyone thinks of my appearance, and I frown at compliments. I would never let anyone else determine the perimeter of my desires.
The only limitations I respect are those related to the fragile state of this body. Although I photograph well, most people find me rather frightening. Nobody has ever dared flirt with me. The people I have dated have all found their way to me by more direct methods. They are compelled less by appearance — because they do not have permission to care about something so superficial — than by the intensity of my beliefs.
If you can look at a picture of a smashed face and use the word beautiful then you are responding to something other than the features depicted. The only thing clearly conveyed by this picture is the fact that I was staring straight ahead.
If you can look at me and use that word then what you are really saying is more of a compliment to your own corporeal reality. If you see beauty where it is not present then you are in fact the beautiful one.