portrait

The streetlight hits from above, a warm orb high up like a summer sun. It scintillates on your brand new hair, surfing its deeply contoured waves until it lands on your shoulders.  Your side window is a museum exhibit and everyone that shares this road with you is welcome to watch.

Today really is your evening. What are you doing it wasting it at the wheel of a metal buffalo that’s stuck in a steamy stampede out of downtown? You should be painting the streets, strutting flamboyantly past the entrance of the neon-framed establishments. 

You know that walk, the one where you confidently swing your hips around like you own the world but you make sure to look down at the floor, as if you were a bit humbled by the heavy burden of your power, and you always leave the faintest hint of a smile on your lips because you refuse to not care, like everyone else pretends to. No, you are different and special and you cherish life and all its blessings that others around you take for granted and everyone should know this about you. Especially on days like these, with your hair so swanky. 

Your phone hangs over your nose like a carrot, imprisoned in a claw above the dashboard. It admires you, patiently asks you for your time. It's not like this cluster of gasoline-chugging beasts is moving any time soon. You grab the jet black slab and make it look at you. There you are, you gorgeous thing. 

The phone circles the space-time continuum around you, trying to capture your best angle. All of them seem to work. Maybe this is not your day, maybe all days are yours. Who in their right mind could ever unlove you, looking like that? 

One eye on the windshield, you press the button, and the phone explodes in a ball of white. There you are, preserved in pixels. You bring the device closer to you and stare with disgust at the deformity that looks back at you. When did your left cheekbone become so swollen?! Is there anything that beast’s opaque, black eyeballs that stare at two different corners of the horizon have in common with your own eyes? The wavy hair that perfectly refracted the light hangs like a red mop over that monster’s skull. 

A horn startles you. Come on, move! Look forward, take your eyes off that thing for a second!

You try the opposite side of your face. The phone glows white again. You had never noticed how protruding your nose looks from this angle. It could almost receive satellite signals, dammit. You pan the phone a little to the left only to be surprised by your asymmetrical chin. Now from the front, and you try to hide those disgustingly thin lips with your best impression of a duck’s beak. You can strain those muscles till they tear, it still won’t make you what you want to be.

You turn around, to one side, then the other, cavorting on the front seat with your arm stretched like it was a flashlight panning the sky, searching for lost stars until your muscles cramp. The upper right angle makes you confront the wrinkles on your forehead and you escape it only to be surprised by the double chin creeping from below your face and you wonder who in their right mind could ever love you, looking like that? 

Where is that girl, that beautiful creature who lives somewhere else inside your phone? The one that lights up the world with her smile and always has the arms of loved ones wrapped around her neck? That girl who loves the beach and binges on perfectly arranged food framed by sparkly silverware. That one girl, who teleports across the world and could melt your heart with a joke, where is she? 

Is she being held hostage by that other, awful girl that stands before you, the one who calls people ugly names from time to time and has cut a poor John Doe in traffic in more than one occasion and isn’t afraid to lie to get out of a situation that doesn’t suit her? The one who almost stole her best-friend’s boyfriend at that one house party?  There she is, that girl on the phone, smelling of lies and deceit and evilness, a garish creature inside and out who could never hope to find comfort in the arms of someone else. Inside that tiny screen she has been living all along, leaving behind her messages and those pictures and videos you should have deleted and a trail of words you don’t recognize as your own anymore. She is friends with your friends and happens to follow the same topics you do. You and her could like each other quite much, if she didn’t make your life so miserable every time you cross sights. 

Another horn groans behind you. 

You close the photo app and push the gas pedal, trying to leave the anguish behind. The streetlights flash past your face, and from every angle you are surrounded by vehicles. You raise your sight, almost ashamed, and find all the faces in the adjacent lane passing by. Faces on your left, faces on your right, faces in front of you, faces stalking your rearview mirror. You wonder what girl they are seeing, which portrait was right all along. You hope  it was the one on your head and all those lovely visual confections you pin to your digital wall, but with every streetlight that creeps past your face you become painfully identified  with the drunken, abstract mess of brushstrokes that hangs on the back of the exhibit. It’s tiring, not knowing which actress is playing you right now. If only everyone could just look the other way.