The Selfie
A Story About Your Skull
I watched her take eleven photos of herself.
Same angle. Same tilt of the head. Same half-smile that said I woke up like this when we both knew she’d been adjusting the light for three minutes.
Eleven photos. She kept one. Deleted ten versions of herself that weren’t quite right. Ten almost-hers that didn’t deserve to exist.
I wasn’t judging. I’ve done it too. Everyone has. That ritual of trying to freeze yourself at your best. Capture the version you want to be remembered as. Archive it somewhere permanent before the permanent thing happens.
She posted it. I watched the likes come in. Little hearts from strangers. Validation from people she’d never meet, confirming that yes, she exists, yes, she matters, yes, right now, in this light, at this angle, she is worth looking at.
I didn’t say anything.
But I thought it.
.
I thought about the photograph and what it doesn’t show.
It doesn’t show five years from now, when the jawline starts to soften.
It doesn’t show ten years from now, when the skin under the eyes gets tired of pretending.
It doesn’t show twenty years from now, when she looks at this photo and feels something between nostalgia and grief. When she realizes she didn’t know how beautiful she was. Nobody ever does. You only see it after it’s gone.
It doesn’t show thirty years from now, when a younger woman looks at her the way she looks at older women now. That brief glance of quiet horror. The recognition that this is coming for all of us.
The photo doesn’t show any of that.
That’s the point of photos.
.
I’m not saying this to be cruel.
I’m saying this because nobody else will.
Because the whole world is designed to help you not think about it. The creams, the filters, the angles, the lighting, the surgery, the denial. An entire economy built on the agreement that we will all pretend time isn’t happening.
And it works. For a while.
You post the photo. You get the hearts. You feel seen. You feel like you matter. And you do. You do matter.
But not because of the photo.
.
Here’s what I wanted to ask her. What I didn’t ask because it would have ruined the evening and probably our whatever-this-was -
What happens when it goes?
Not if. When.
When the thing you’ve built your worth on starts to leave. When the heads stop turning. When the likes slow down. When you walk into a room and nobody’s eyes follow you anymore because they’re following someone younger.
What’s left?
What did you build underneath the beautiful?
.
I think about this more than I should.
I think about all the women I’ve known who were taught, before they could speak, that their value was their face. Their body. The ugly algorithm of fuckability that they didn’t choose but learned to optimize for because what else were they supposed to do?
I think about my mother looking in the mirror and saying things about herself that would be abuse if someone else said them.
I think about the girls I grew up with who knew, by age twelve, that their beauty was a currency. And spent the next twenty years earning and spending it, not realizing the exchange rate was always dropping.
I think about the women who did everything right. Maximized the asset. Leveraged the attention. Built a life on the foundation of being wanted.
And then the foundation shifted.
Not because they did anything wrong.
Just because time is undefeated.
.
I watched her smile at her phone. Another heart. Another confirmation.
She looked happy. She looked beautiful.
She looked like someone standing on a balcony, enjoying the view, not looking down.
.
I’m not above this.
I look in the mirror too. I flex when no one’s watching. I blow up my chest for photos. I have my angles. I have my lighting. I have my own small negotiations with decay.
The difference is I lost the negotiation early. Average face. Average body. Nothing that was ever going to be a currency. So I had to build something else. Had to find worth in other rooms.
Maybe that’s luck. Maybe being ugly young is a gift. You’re forced to develop a self that doesn’t depend on being looked at.
Or maybe I’m just telling myself that. Maybe I’m just bitter. Maybe if I’d been beautiful, I’d be doing the same thing. Optimizing the asset. Pretending time isn’t real.
I don’t know.
.
Here’s what I do know:
The face you have right now is the oldest it’s ever been and the youngest it will ever be again.
This moment, right now, is the peak of something. Not the peak of beauty, necessarily. But the peak of this particular version of you. Tomorrow there will be a slightly different version. Older by a day. Different by a degree.
It’s happening right now. While you read this.
You’re becoming someone else.
.
I wanted to tell her:
You’re not your face. You’re not your body. You’re not the photo or the likes or the eyes that follow you into rooms.
You’re the thing that remains when all of that leaves. And something will remain. The question is whether you’ve met her yet. Whether you’ve built her. Whether you’ve given her anything to stand on when the other thing falls away.
Because it will fall away. For you. For me. For everyone reading this who thinks they’re the exception.
There are no exceptions.
There’s just time.
And what you did with it while you were looking in the mirror.
.
She put her phone down. Looked at me.
“You’re quiet.”
“Just thinking.”
“About what?”
.
I almost told her.
I almost said: I’m thinking about your skull. I’m thinking about the bone beneath the skin. I’m thinking about the fact that everything I’m attracted to right now is temporary and I don’t know how to hold desire and decay in the same hand.
I almost said: I’m thinking about what you’ll look like at sixty and whether you’ve thought about it and whether thinking about it would help or just ruin your twenties.
I almost said: I’m thinking about my grandmother, who was beautiful once, who tells me this like it’s a secret, like she needs me to know that she was worth looking at too, once, before the world decided she was invisible.
.
But I didn’t say any of that.
“Nothing,” I said. “You look nice.”
She smiled.
I meant it.
Both things were true.
.
End.