Hollow

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Sitting on the bus, enervated by the sun, beaten down by the base beats that usurp their songs like bones take over bodies, image takes over meaning. What happens when a skeleton grows bigger than its body? Does it develop its own vain obsessions to look into mirrors? Would it sense something wrong when checking its own eyeless reflection in passing black cars or store windows? Would it want to put on form flattering clothes? A hooded trench coat to go with the whole Goth look? Or something more revealing to show off its delicate arms?

For an awkward moment in fashion, models with smudged eyeliner and cheekbone blush posed angularly – elbows poking out of concave backs and bodies keeling over their haute couture like clothes racks. A friend of mine who captured starving Cambodian orphans on film was startled by their uncanny likeness to American fashion models. Death and beauty have shared an uneasy courtship in the West. Sleeping beauty looks so peacefully and beautifully dead. My mother looked peaceful in her coffin, but when I leaned over to kiss her, she was cold and hard.

The perfectly powdered face of a geisha, her red lips an erotic reminder of life on a stark white face. Young skin, lineness, spotless, untouched by the world, inexperienced, unlived, seems so beautifully peaceful that we become fixated on it. We want to eat babies. We want to squeeze children as if we could swallow them up. We stroke the faces of our lovers looking for ourselves in them, as if they are mere mirrors. Our skeletons have usurped us, and they search tragically for their eyes in the eyes of others.

The bus turned the corner and the sun shifted. It now burned a whole in my right cheek, injecting it with DNA degenerating rays. I began to fear it, this strong, no-nonsense Bahamian sun that has rendered its inhabitants inky black and just as effusive, flinging those Cajun rays right back into the atmosphere. But my skin is not so dark. It doesn’t fight back. It shrivels beneath the weather. It bubbles and percolates and shows makes gaping screams with its pores.

It knows it is alive when it reddens and puckers beneath this Sub-tropical sky. It’s different today from what it was yesterday. It knows it is alive when it tries to heal itself like a broken heart breaks open layers of truth.

27 must be the perfect age. It is the age between youth and life. The impalpable crux when one feels the body age for the first time. I grew fibroids in my womb at this age. It is the age when we have to start thinking about the future, the long awaited future that seemed so far away at 25. My doctor, wary of my family history, urged me to start mammograms at 30. Three more years. Tick tock. It is the age when we start to think about our biological clock. My friend advised that I have children before 34 because after that the chances of birth defects sky rocket. It is the age when we look back at what we missed.

My sister said I ought to stop looking for scholarships and ways to get off of the island. Scholarships are for young people. Am I going to die soon? I’ve been looking more beautiful lately. I’ve lost weight without doing anything special. My cheekbones have sharpened. My acne’s gone away. Is this what it’s like right before?

The bus driver was reckless. He sped down Carmichael Road like he was trying to avoid customers. The young girl at the front took the money from the customers. She was round and smooth, probably only nineteen. I am starting to assume that most young people are younger than I am. Her skin was supple – no crows feet near the eyes, her lips plump and hanging as she looked at the man, flirting with incredulity. The games of youth: so hollow, so skeletal.