Skin Deep

I remember. I have dreams of how I once was and I know myself in those dreams. This is how it is when you are almost an angel. Wings are earned via the blood, sweat and tears of living many lives. We grow our wings as we ourselves grow. This is the way of it. How it has always been. This world has remained God’s Garden, it was we who changed when we stole what was forbidden to us and lost ourselves in the mists of newly found shame. We left the confines of eternal childhood and suffered the necessary fall. Seeds thrown into the winds and scattered upon the land. Still, our potential resides within us. As it always has.

The visitations of the fragments of who and what I was, haunt me. As you would expect, the most recent of my previous lives stands squarely before me. Front of the queue, she bestows upon me a knowing smile which is all mystery. She is a mirror filled with answers. Those answers take the form of questions. That is her gift to me. 

And I am that gift.

Come the morning I am presented with the rude dilemma of my being. In my dreams, my shadow lives radiate beauty. The contrast of my existence in the truth of this world is stark. I am dizzied and nauseated by what I have become, and I struggle to reconcile myself with my purpose. I am all confusion and in the storm of what I now am I plead for help that I know will never be afforded me. This painful chaos is my lesson. A lesson that I have wilfully dismissed time and again.

The man in the mirror is a monster. I have no connection with what I see before me and I do not understand what is to be done. I am all conflict. An unseen storm far out at sea. There is no redemption in the image I gaze upon. I weep for myself and all that is lost, but no one hears my lament.

Can I describe what it is that haunts my waking days and makes a mockery of my existence? Perhaps this is the first faltering step that I must take on an abortive journey that has begun in calamity and can only end in ruined mystery.

Once, a long time ago, I had been playing with my favourite doll by the fireside. The day had been cold and sharp. I had run through the parkland as free as a bird. This is the way of small girls. We are creatures of vivid imagination soaring on the thermals of joy. A foreshadowing of the life that awaits us when we have done all that is to be done on this earth.

After dinner I lay before the fire in the perfect calm of family bliss as Papa read and Mama worked on her cross stitch. I would seek out that same cross stitch design in every life beyond this one. It spoke to me of a love that endured as only a mother’s love can.

This was how the three of us were. We enjoyed the comfort of companionable silence as I played out the latest dramatic adventure in the playground of my mind. My doll was the future-me and she was to have the best of lives.

The following morning was a waking nightmare much the same as that which I now constantly endure. The doll whose name I forget due to the sorrow that befell me that day was altered in the most horrific manner. The heat of the fire had melted her face beyond recognition and my love for her had burnt away during the tragedy of that night. I kept her though. I squirreled her away in my trunk of secret things. I can’t for the life of me understand why I did such a thing. The mind of that little girl may as well reside in that long lost trunk of hidden trinkets.

The monster before me is a grotesquery. A lumpen, misshapen thing. I am ashamed to be. But be I must. For that is all I have within me and I owe it to all who have gone before. I am the culmination of all the lives and hopes and dreams of my forebears and I must go on, if only to hand the baton to one more worthy than I.

My conspicuous form hurts beyond imagining. I am a divine belch. An overwhelming odour of cabbage disrupting a perfect spring morning. I am subjected to my monstrosity reflected in the eyes of all I encounter and I wonder at the punishment that is being meted out upon me. I ask myself what I have done to deserve this torture and I have no answers for the forsaken crowd that previously cheered me on in our quest for the wings that we know will be our just reward. We feel cheated. As though the unknowable rules of the game of this life have been altered just as we near the finish line.

And the joke is on me. I am a joke with no sensible punchline. The mystery of my existence must be contended with. This I come to terms with as the days of my ordeal unfold. These are the cards that have been played. This is all that I have and all that I am. 

With resignation to my plight comes a sort of calm. I seethe the pressure of my frustrations from my being and I am left with the form that only a mother could love. I am all that this poor soul has and I have to find it within myself to love him. This is all that is left to the both of us.

Any reconciliation between that which lies within the monstrous is a trial by combat. Only when I succumb do I triumph. I have applied my own conspiracy of logic upon myself and hobbled my limbs into the bargain. As I fall flat upon my disfigured face and eat the dirt that I will inevitably return to, my mind glories in the absurdity of that dirt and something speaks a truth to me that unravels the resistance I have so wilfully constructed in the stead of progress.

We pass dirt every day. That is the nature of these meat machines that we inhabit. We choose to describe our existence as the habitation of the world, when the truth of us is we live within the confines of a form that in one turn is beautiful and in the next is vile, dirt emitting thuggery. 

Behind closed doors we seat ourselves upon thrones and rid ourselves of a portion of our eternal shame. We require constant maintenance to prevent us from stinking. And we have become increasingly prissy in our denial of the functions of our bodies. Twisting ourselves out of true. Adorning ourselves in attractive lies that are far more odious than the truth of us.

The soil that brushes my lips reminds me that I am dust held together by a miraculous spark of life. A transitory moment. A wonderful heartbeat of the universe. I am the eyes and ears that the infinite uses to understand itself a little more. I am both infinitesimally insignificant and everything that has ever been and will ever be. 

If life is a box of chocolates I resolve to place this misshapen morsel in my mouth and delight in the experience of our union. I will accept the imperfect as I myself am imperfectly made. Yet I am made in the image of the perfect. This I consider as I also consider my fleeting relationship with the chocolate melting upon my tongue. The enthralling taste of the outer giving way to the secrets that lay beneath the surface.

Beauty is the key that unlocks the mystery of me. The eye of the beholder is the portal to all truths and all lies. There is always a choice. It is within me to move the camera and with it the narrative. I will think of truth and I will speak of truth and in the speaking of it I will direct myself to what is real and I will love that which I see.

I am beautiful. There is no dichotomy in this. I laboured in the fields of my past and sang a lament of beauty lost. But that beauty remains mine. If it was, then it is and it will always be. Time is a trick that we all fall for in our haste to end what has barely begun. We fear the end as we run full tilt in the wanton waste of what now is.

In the celebration of my beauty I am no longer arrogant. I just am. There is no judgement. I release myself from such things. I am here and I will be. And as I relax into this skin of mine and live my gratitude for the moment I am afforded, everything changes. The mystery does not reveal itself as much as chuckle at my misapprehensions and show me that there never was any mystery at all. The veil of deceitful struggle fades in the laughter of the absurdity that we entrap ourselves in. Sheets and blankets of restless slumber swaddling us until we awake and cast them off in order to face the freshly made day.

I am learning the lesson that I should have learnt in all the lives I have lived. I am beginning to understand and in understanding there is a joy that lifts me. Brings me aloft as I have always desired.

To love the obviously beautiful is a simple and fleeting affair. There is no real love in such an endeavour. To curate a limited treasure of baubles and love that which is precious to our greed blinded eye is a travesty. We are ungracious in our spiteful desecration of all that is. We are meant to be grateful for the fare that is laid upon our table. To give thanks before we dine hungrily upon the truths before us. All that we see, feel and experience is meant for us. All of it without exception.

I know not whether I have earned my wings. But in my heart I know that this is enough, for I am lighter than I have ever been and I feel the light within me as never before. I am who I am and I have learned not only to love myself but to see the beauty of all things. A beauty reflected within me as I bear witness to the wonders of creation.

The monster smiles and the smile is a moment of untold bliss. I have found my dragon and I have slain my darkness with the fire of a love that transcends all. I am become more beautiful than I knew possible, and my self-inflicted shame falls away as I rise up at last.