By elementary she was the school doll, the most popular, the most liked, the most envied.
By freshman year she was plastic, big green eyes and a perfectly symmetrical, if only slightly angular, face, with high cheekbones and a developed figure still coming into itself. And it was there that she mastered her skills as a puppet master, a story weaver, a woman who could bend the world to her means. Boys were as easy to come by as they were to abdicate. Men were harder, but she liked a challenge, and the free drinks that seemed to find her at every bar; who was to know she wasn't even 16 yet? Her twenties were a blur of men and booze and parties and drugs and sex, one man after another after another in the endless destructive cycle of her youth. She knew why …show more content…
they all liked her, but why was she to care?
Men used to hang on her every word and laugh at her every joke, she enjoyed the company and assumed that she was simply superior to her more plain friends. She had no wants, no needs, and cared nothing for money, she was always provided for and that was the way that she liked it. But since the crows-feet and thin lines began to run rivers down from her sunken eyes and feeble nose to her thinning lips and sagging jowls, things started to change.
Like staring into the surface of the lake, through the distorting ripples and upturned leaves, her her own face. The years had taken their toll, no longer was her youth as it once was. She was a worn, withered husk of a woman, soft skin that once clung to shapely bones in attractive slimness, had filled out and drooped. Every line and age mark became more pronounced, she felt like her skin was pained on; beige as her father’s leather couch, beige like a tanned hide that wrinkled and burned in the light of day.
Come fifty she began to unravel, when the lines of age began to thickly etch themselves onto her face. It was like her beauty had been left behind one day, like a forgotten bag at a bus station, she didn't know when it had fled, she only knew that one day it was simply gone. But she could not just shrug and carry on. She could not imagine how her face that was once as fresh as any spring petal, years ago, could now be no more indistinguishable from any other withered prune. Her hair, once russet brown with waves of silk and amber was now short and thin, choppy with that shade of silver white that graces only weathered faces. She refused to be left in the trenches, by a foe that she could not outrun.
At 45 she was a mess. The drugs and booze had finally caught up to her and things were falling apart. She stopped dating, or rather men stopped dating her. Her self-esteem was tied directly to her beauty, she had no other qualities, and for the first time she realized how transitory it was. Her bathroom was a nest of expensive face creams and miracle wrinkle solutions. She hardly ate and worked out feverishly at the gym, seemingly to no avail as the weight seemed to pour on until she was nothing but bone. She still partied like a twenty year old and dated men half her age. She was falling into a hole of her own making, angst and hate and depressions and crushed dreams.
When fifty-one hit, roots greyed and wrinkles became deeply engraved in her once flawless face, that’s when the surgeries began. New lips, new eyes, botox, liposuction, lifts, tucks, pulls: one failed surgery after another. Yet, no matter how desperately she tried, she couldn't seem to reverse the effects of aging, the years and decades of damage sowed by time and wrought by bad decisions. She could only wage her silent war in silent resentment against her invisible and silent foe.
Aging is the gift that keeps on giving, that keeps on taking, that kept on grieving her.
She thinks of all the passed years, all the years belonging to that foreign girl that she once, all drifting only further away, as if she had never even existed. She could no longer recall all of what she had done in her flaming youth, in her years of romance and teenage angst, she didn’t remember the coffee shop lunches or her ventures in friendship and betrayal. She couldn't even remember the names of her closest friends in high school or her first boyfriend- how inseparable they had once been and how now they meant nothing-. When she closed her eyes she could see her mother's eyes, her aged eyes, the ones that had seen so much, and knew that her eyes held the same desperate
desolation.
If time was a thief then aging was a murderer. But it wasn't the ticking clock, that shattered her, but the slow stuttering collapse in insignificance; into a world where she was no longer beautiful. No longer needed nor wanted. Loneliness became bitter friend who visited her often and promised visits from friends, never delivered, ate away at her like savage. She used to look at old photos of herself that she had stored away. How could she have gone from that beautiful young woman with her whole life ahead of her, to her current, empty shell of a person. She didn't even feel like a person, more of a ghost, wandering around endlessly searching for however long she had left, regretting decisions, drowning in loneliness, and envying every younger more beautiful girl that she crossed paths with; even though she knew the fate that would befall them. She couldn't help but yearn after it, that intangible thing that she would never again have.
Now, at sixty-four, she was broke, abandoned and homeless, Celia Hallow is one of the unseen, who walk in broad daylight, clothed by spare change and fed by the local soup kitchen, vying for a spot at any shelter, reminiscing about those days when she was once young and beautiful.