To This False Plague

Vividly, I recall my childhood confusion when watching adults beam with glee and shower compliments on friends and relatives returned from hospital with dark-rimmed eyes and sallow skin that seemed on the verge of decay. I looked for hints of guile in other children’s eyes, but could find none. When I asked my teachers and my parents why on earth anyone would do that to themselves, the answer was always the same: To be healthier and more beautiful.

It was only during a spate of zombie apocalypse films released online that I found any approximation in the media of what the intervention seemed to me to produce. That’s it! I wanted to shout, That’s what they look like! Yet even my friends, who reacted with such loathing to the monsters portrayed on screen, spoke of the intervention only with admiration and yearning to undertake it themselves once they were old enough.

My greatest disillusionment came in high school. I had a girlfriend then, with whom I had so much in common: we liked the same bands and running shoes, even cried out Yeah! Exactly! on finding out we drank our coffee black at first, then added milk and syrup last to finish on the sweetest part. I thought we’d be on the same wavelength about everything. But she too said she wanted the intervention.

I tried my best to talk her out of it. Of course, I had to persuade her by talking around my arguments, for fear she would doubt my sanity. I built a flimsy case on financial costs and logistics. I downloaded and printed out reams of research papers by so-called experts whose arguments, weak though they were, at least had popular mandate. But she only smiled and shook her head, and said she’d have the intervention on her 18th birthday.

I went with her because I loved her, waited in the hospital lobby praying I’d been wrong, that she’d in fact step out of the operating room as radiant to me as to everyone who believed in the intervention. In fact, I nursed a desperate hope that it had been egotism, delitescent contempt, or some other defect in my character that rendered all those others so ugly in my eyes; and that the love I felt for her might reveal her afterwards as lovely to me as to everyone else. At times, during those long hours of waiting, I almost managed to convince myself it could be so.

After she came through those doors she stood before me smiling that terrible smile, a horror to behold—all the more heinous for the joy she expected me to share in her sunken eyes and festering, corrupted countenance. What must she have seen in my face? Plainly she was bewildered. How could I tell her–when she herself saw in the mirror the complete antithesis of what I saw–that she had destroyed all hope for us?

Yes, I tried to go on loving her: wasn’t true love unconditional? I willed myself to hold her, to still see her in the lovely natural form I’d known, while nauseated by her sickly scaling flesh and odour of decay. Over and over I saw the pain in her eyes when I recoiled from her. What’s wrong? she would ask, and my heart would crumble for her artless tenderness. I had to find some way to reconcile myself to her vile extern—and for a time I did succeed, even making love to her under the auspices of fantasies wherein I might close my eyes, hold my breath and pretend she was still the pure, sweet girl she’d been before the intervention.

But the repressed manifestations of my disgust drove a wedge between us. I made excuses not to meet her, choosing instead to masturbate to images of beauty untransformed, unaltered—to the very forms society declared deficient. I fetishized imperfection, sublimated it beyond the flesh to encompass the universe in totality. I longed for some unspoiled wilderness where I might lose myself in nature’s imperfection.

The tears that dripped from her putrefying eyebags haunt me still, the way they ran down her rotten cheeks, the bloat of grief rendering her lost beauty all the more repulsive.

Now I understand the nature of this pox upon my faculties—as it surely must be my defect alone—and I know it needs must sentence me to solitude. I push myself beyond exhaustion to attain to ever higher peaks, where from each newly surmounted summit I might bask in glorious dawn and, at least for the duration that transient euphoria that follows each achievement, ignore the yawning gulf that shall ever sunder me from the rest of humanity.