What Are You Afraid of? I Have Made a Whore of Myself
I have this problem of contradiction. I both love and hate myself more than should be humanly possible. More than is healthy. I have this overwhelming urge to prove to everyone just how sensational I am, just how much they miss when they let their gaze run past my figure, or when they let their eyes stop to appreciate only the newly adult shape of my body. “I have so much to offer, how can’t you idiots see that?”
It’s a consistent conversation I indulge myself in, how could one person so unique, someone I could fall in love with, be so fucking lonely.
Discarded.
I know I am beautiful, at the very least fuckable, that I am an object of desire. I know that I am the type of person someone could lust over, write a book about, fall in love with.
I see my body in the bedroom mirror and stare. Not divinity perhaps, but Grecian, like the sculptures of Aphrodite; soft and round and tantalising.
I am so self-obsessed, vain, tiresomely so, that even this recognition is not enough. It never matters how hungry the eyes of others can be,
I want them starving, desperate.
When someone writes a book about me, I don’t want to play Eve. I am red and lust and tantalising, I am as inevitable as sin itself, consumable. I am the earth-born and bound fruit; underlooked, appealing, the amalgamation of Genesis. A symbol of heaven and hell and condemnation, undeniably powerful.
But I expect too much of others, foolishly thinking they might be clever enough to understand just how astonishing my mere existence is.
If I told someone I was an apple, they’d think I was an idiot.
I love myself more than is humanly possible.
But, again, I have this problem of contradiction. Because what else should a monster as horrific as myself be, but discarded and lonely. It does not matter if I could love someone such as myself. It does not matter. Of course I could love myself, a pig has no problem fucking a pig, it’s the same species.
I am equally as rotten as myself.
I know these rotten insides intimately, I know myself well, and I am desperate, damn near begging, for refuge. An escape. A constant conversation of “please,” a never ending and screeching chorus of
“Just let me leave whatever miserable thing this is.”
I want to rip apart my flesh by my nails and consume the gravel and dirt around me, stuff myself full, until my body is no longer my body. Until I am a landing platform, from which something entirely new can grow, or until I may be used as the soil for dogs to piss on in someone’s garden.
Maybe then I’ll be less alone, with friends of piss and thorns and perhaps even a dandelion or two? Perhaps someone will step on the life I tore myself inside out to find, the life I choked for. Someone worthy of notice, worth stepping on.
When I think of the insidious design of my life, I can never be sure who is more responsible for the way it has played out.
The arrogant plaything or the miserable creature;
I am intelligent, fuckable and soft.
I am a miserable little thing.
I have made a whore of myself, I have looked into the mirror of my soul and turned away in shame. I have looked into the mirror of my bedroom and looked further in hopes of reprieve. I have abandoned my soul, made a mockery of an institution and learnt what it means to self-destruct.
When I think of what I am afraid of, I’m not sure which part of myself it is. The woman so insatiably vain that she is hideous, or the monster so desperately ugly that it is pitiful.
In either case I am hideous. or desperately ugly.
My biggest fear is that I am entirely wrong.
That my fear isn’t these contradicting selves, but rather the knowledge;
that at the end of the day,
when I add together these sums of my being,
there is still not one single part of myself that I could fathom loving.
- Jacqui
Jacqui Claire is from Sydney, Australia. She is currently working on a poetry collection that will be coming out late 2022. You can find more of her writing on her website: https://jacquiclaire.wordpress.com/ . And you can also find her writing on her Instagram.