OTM draft Part 1 - The Good Old Days

There was a time when I wasn´t like this. When I was a kid I would come back from school on the yellow school van, my grandmother at the door waiting for me to close the gate as one of the other kids would glide back the van´s side door with a clanking bang. I would wipe my feet on the bushy doormat and my grandma would lift my school bag just as I reached up to give  her a kiss, and she would always say “My dear, this bag is way too heavy, you are going to ruin your back if you keep bringing so many books home!”

I would smile at her and rush to the bathroom to wash my hands. The reflection on the mirror was that of a scruffy girl with thick, dark and static-like hair. No matter how tight my mother did up my braid in the morning I would always come home all over the place. The little space between two of my teeth had started to push a bright sharp tooth that I loved liking over with my tongue when no one was looking. The expression my face made when I did that made me laugh, and my almond shaped eyes sparkled with absolute glee.

Both my dad and my mum once pointed out that I had eyebrows that were “just like Elizabeth Taylor´s”, which at that time I didn´t know if it was true for I had no idea who that lady was.  Whenever I remembered that I would wiggle said eyebrows in front of the bathroom mirror, flap my eyelashes and blow fish kisses at myself.

My mum and dad would usually arrive soon after me and dinner would be served just as it started getting dark. It was always a full meal at the round kitchen table, all four mats were set with white paper servilletes, my mum being the last one to sit down as she placed a steaming dish of vegetables next to the rice and the meat of choice for the day: pork chops, curried chicken or fish. There would occasionally be a tomato and lettuce salad, but it was only my dad who would really go crazy about that.

To Be Continued ...

OTM draft Part 1 - INTRO

A friend once asked me “If you had a choice between instantly having absolute wealth, absolute intelligence or absolute beauty, which one would you prefer?

If I ever were to encounter a situation in which I could immediately fulfill any of the three choices at stake, I would undoubtedly and instinctively pick absolute beauty. After all, how many times had I had to wax, shave, cream, brush, conceal, diet, style, exercise or even planned to be cut and stitched without ever feeling truly satisfied with my looks?

But why was this reflection upon my friend´s question the first one to pop into my mind? Was I that shallow to wonder about beauty before wealth and intelligence? After all, from a logical point of view, either absolute wealth or absolute intelligence would in the end lead me to my desire for beauty, as the first could buy it for me and the later could help me figure out how to optimally achieve it. Either way, my central focus of concern remained connected to only one of the choices offered, regardless of which one I ultimately chose. This realization made me feel uneasy, as matters of beauty always did, and I sensed that my inadequate feelings towards the nature of my thoughts had been purposely provoked. My friend knew me well enough to figure out that when it came to beauty, no other alternative reality would suffice my thirst for physical perfection.

It therefore made little sense for her to ask me something she already knew the answer to. There had to be something behind her question to which my obvious confession would signify a chain of events I had yet to understand. “Intelligence”, I said, resisting falling into the confession trap my friend had set up for me, wondering if the more politically correct answer would  shackle my friends false inquiry and give me glimpse of her intentions. “Why?” She asked smiling. I could see she had figured out my decoy and was playing along with my public resolution. “Because with absolute intelligence I could learn all the languages in the world that would enable me to talk to whomever I wanted at the after party I would attend after receiving two Nobel Prices, a Peace one and a Science one for creating a mathematical formula for world peace”.

As my friend laughed out loud I started fidgeting with my thumb. My face was all smiles, but I was actually experiencing a familiar panging nervousness that accompanied me whenever I wanted to hide feeling uncomfortable, sad or impotent. Those were the three feelings that usually accompanied me back then, always one or the other and sometimes two or all of them together. The index finger in my right hand kept circling the nail on my thumb, and my increasingly sweaty palms couldn´t help to disguise the faint scratching sound of my caressing dry skin. Apparently my friend had also come aware of the strange sound too, as she stopped dead in her laugh and looked at my right hand, which I quickly lay still. She looked me straight in the eye and said “Are you ok?”