I’m reasonably unattractive and I like it this way.  When I look into the mirror, my eyes are satisfied with what they see.  They agree with me.  They’re comfortable.  My skin like milk.  My bad haircut.  My freckles.  My lips chapped and tasting of blood.  My eyes a sea of vigilant innocence.

Beauty is skin deep and shallow, but ugliness pierces to and through the very core.  My brain is festering with tumors that don’t plan to destroy me, putrefying records, damp wood, and tarnished tears.  My heart is filled with feelings that do and don’t subsist.  My lungs are polluted with spores.  My viscera hollow.

I like this ugliness because it’s who I am.  It’s me.  If I tried on beauty, it wouldn’t fit.  Its domicile in this body will be nowhere established, its absence is perpetual.  Beauty appears around me quite consistently, though my skin never absorbs it.

The music I hear right now is beauty in lifeless form.  If it were incarnate, it would be a cerulean ocean against a scarlet sunset.  It would be a pomegranate broken open beside smooth, pallid sand.  It would be luscious, desired.

I claim I don’t dream of beauty, but I do, I do.

I move and respire and exist in my ugliness and realize how overrated beauty is.  I am content in my ugliness and realize how underappreciated a pretty girl could be.

I saunter through the foliage and filth of ugliness and feel like hiding.

Karah Keffeler