tuesday, october 26th (2004)

9:43 p.m.

She drives me crazy the way she's always pulling at that tag of skin under her chin. She used to be beautiful. Hell, she still is. But she started developing this droop under her face. When she looked in the mirror, it was all she could see. The years catching up with her. She'd frown at her reflection, and the flesh seemed to extend the edges of her mouth downward, like the frown ran all the day down to her fucking cleagvage. She would hold the underside of her face up to her ears in front of the mirror. That's what I'd look like, she'd tell herself. But it just looked like she was being choked by an invisible hand. Plastic surgery was out of the question; she was determined to grow old gracefully, and more importantly, truthfully. To her closest girlfriends she would muse about her "chicken-neck." She was determined to make friends with this new limb. Sometimes when she lay in bed, she found herself feeling around for it in the dark. She pulled at it, fondled it, demanded it to be present at all times. Always or never, she asked of it. It promised to try, but Gravity was a powerful foe. Then again, Gravity was the owner of this loose skin, so she felt she would have to make friends with It as well. She was a good Christian girl; she believed that enemies should be made friends with. The boys she dated never noticed the purse on her head until she mentioned it. Then they would be like, "Oh, yeah, that is peculiar." And then they would find themselves losing interest in her, not really knowing why. She knew why and she made a promise to herself not to mention it anymore. Not that she was trying to hide anything (this wasn't something she could hide), but putting so much attention on it tended to put suitors ill at ease. They were not inclined to make friends with it, as they had made friends with, say, their penis or a birthmark (not that they would ever admit to that). So she stopped talking about the loose flesh under her chin; her girlfriends, too, had long since stopped wanting to talk about it. She felt a little crazy talking to it, particularly in private, so she took to stroking it. It was kind of like sign language, love from her hand to her chin skin, an unconscious thing. People might see her doing it and say, "What are you doing?" to which she would pull her hand away and say, "Nothing." Or, more likely, those people catching her doing it would examine the act in silence, and never say a word about it, lest they risk hurting her feelings. I guess I fall into that last category. But I feel better now that I've gotten it off my chest.