Untitled 12/28/07
If I am to be honest, then let it be with this: I hate the way I smile. Rather, I hate the way I look when I smile—so much so that I routinely destroy photographic evidence of my smiles upon first encounter. This is the toughest thing that I can confess at the moment. It’s a tragic thing really, to have not a single photograph of me in a moment of ecstatic joy or joie de vive; as in those moments the dumb feelings drown any pretense of sophistication, and I am alas, at my most beautiful.
I’m not vain either. Yet I must confess that I am vain. There is no intricate or elaborate dichotomy, no analysis and no hidden brilliance that can save me from this, and I must lay it bare as the hot son.
Somewhere in the ether of erased photographs is one where I stood before a store front, posing for a photograph when the person I was with uttered a profanity as the picture was taken. In a brief and quite perfect instant I smile, letting my guard slip like a city undefended and as I looked upon the camera’s display I could see what the world must see and yet what I fail to see everyday, and I worry if the world may know some part of me better than I do.
In the ephemera of the moment, my mouth was agape, my teeth flashing white, and my eyes and cheeks did not appear as I had known them. Gasp. I want immediately to destroy the image before me. I want to crush the cheerful doppelganger, whose simplistic visage and utter lack of offensive pretension seems to reveal something about me in direct opposition to my self preconceptions.
I cannot adequately describe the feeling of relief when I deleted the photo, though I suppose it feels like the moment after the doctor has grabbed your genitals and asked you to cough. (It’s not as if there is any terror in any event—though no one wishes to be pleased in such a manner.)
I regret it completely now, though. The photo was terrible and beautiful and can no longer be offered to posterity as evidence that I was—and still am—a person who could be considered to be a happy one. It was the truest photo I ever took of myself and my only solace is that it is somehow burned into my memory like a beating: the ecstatic moment borne of the love of the brilliant impromptu of rejoinders; the joy of a small thing, utter happiness which will never and can never be obliterated, only forgotten.
