Narcissus

A few years ago, when we were up in Maine, I wrote this absolutely hilarious journal entry. After dinner we went to the lighthouse, and watched the tide come in ("water piling up like children after recess, hurrying before the clock struck high tide"). On the way there, we passed a man painting a picture of the lighthouse, liberally adding wildflowers as he deemed necessary.

I was suddenly struck with a longing that he would fall into a dangerous obsession with me. I felt so pretty there, that day, loose and beautiful, pink and blue and fair. Botero-esque, of course, but that's been the reality of the past few years. He would follow me around, pleading that I would pose for him, wanting nothing but to paint me. And I suppose eventually I would consent, and he would paint me (famously, of course) and I would put up with him. But I would be disdainful, and bored, and disinterested. Ah, I would be so charmingly abusive.

I would make him great and destroy him. Eventually his love would consume him up - unspoken lust or refused advances, and all the while a devastating obsession. He would disappear, into the streets of the town, or maybe off a pier.

It's probably one of the funniest things I've ever written.

At the end I say "It is always so sad that no one ever finds me as beautiful as I find myself."

I am so in love with my body that it's distracting. I sit and stare in the mirror and lose myself with love of my face and my hair and my smile. A lot of it is that I've lost weight, but it's more than that - it's that I've really started taking care of myself in all sorts of ways. I'd just neglected my body for a while, and I stopped this summer at my aunt's urging. And now I seem to be just tremendously vain.

It always makes girls uncomfortable, and unbelievably critical, to say things like this to them. The girls in highschool used to give me such hell for taking pictures of myself, for staring at myself in the mirrors. Ah me. I suppose I could be more tactful. It isn't that I think I'm more beautiful, I don't think you can really rank women like that, it's just that I think I'm lovely.

I figure, if no one else is going to love my body, it may as well be me. The poor painter missed out (sorta - Why must love for me be destructive? Hmm? This can't be a good sign).

I have the hots for myself and I nearly don't care who knows it.

2002-10-12, narcissus

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