i think being regarded as very beautiful inherits you a kind of boldness. beautiful women are always the most fearless; the ones who greet strangers with genuine enthusiasm and wash their faces very little. beautiful men are usually blandly undaunted and strikingly self-assured. strangely, they are all unbothered by the idea of bodily harm. maybe its because if you are beautiful in this way (the way of objective and constant), you are happy to cut your hand or bathe in cold water because you have never known your physicality to displease. perhaps those rare, temporary moments when it does contain so much novelty it feels like delight. or maybe beautiful people are simply what they appear as: the most evolved. the divine amongst us.

---

My face and body have made my life in the most tangible ways. I looked around my apartment and all I saw were my amputated appendages. The flowers on my table had my teeth nestled between each petal – the flower stall owner had complimented my smile and given me the bouquet for free. The sideboard by the window belonged to an ex boyfriend who, for the duration of our relationship, carried a cropped photo of my legs in a skirt in his wallet and forgot my birthday twice. My legs hung from the wood when I looked at it now, thigh to ankle, obscenely inanimate and useless. My floors were free from scratches despite the innumerable times I had tediously shifted my furniture around – there was always a man in the building who would lift a heavy armchair in return for finding out what my home smelt like. I looked out the window. The petrol in my car was there because the man at the station squeezed my arms once and continues to ring through all my fuel transactions at a discounted price. My physicality earnt me everything – every restaurant I ever got into without queueing, the leather of my shoes and the bidet tap I used to make myself cum 3 times a week. It paid for my house and my food and my bills. If I smiled in front of flashing bulbs in clothes that weren’t mine it meant I could eat steak for dinner that night. Because I tolerated an unwanted hand on my thigh under a table, I was allowed to pay rent late. My body and soul were switched – my physical form the real orchestrator of my life, my conscious mind an inevitable passive witness to its shell’s conducting. One day this experience will expire and everything will collapse in on itself; I will find myself staring dead-eyed at traffic and reluctantly handle tragic health supplements from shops I am suspicious of. I think I am extremely close to madness now.