Self-portrait on paper

I was ruthlessly decluttering when I came across a folder of assignments from my creative writing class, taken during my first semester at Purdue. There I found plenty of very poor poetry, and a terrible short story, but one thing struck me: it was all written with complete honesty. It was written by someone who didn't care how she writing was received; I was writing for myself. I don't think I could write with such honesty anymore. Several years of writing for a grade, of regurgitating exactly what the professor wants to hear, seem to have knocked that out of me.

 

I thought the following assignment was interesting. We had to write a one-page description of ourselves, off the top of our heads. I find that I didn't so much complete the assignment as meander down the lanes of childhood memories as they presented themselves.

 

 

Sometimes my reflection surprises me. The person looking back at me isn't who I expect to see. She is sometimes older than expected, sometimes younger. She sometimes looks thinner than I expect -- (though so rarely as to be hardly worth mentioning) -- sometimes fatter. Her face nearly always looks longer than I think it should. Looking hard at my reflection reminds me of a game my sister and I used to play when we were young. We called it "Mirror Girls." I'd look at my reflection -- really stare -- and think: Who are you? Who is in there?

 

 

My chin bears a scar caused by falling off a horse in the Lake District when I was about ten. My horse bolted away from the rest of the group, took off down the mountainside at full pelt. I recall thinking that I really should hang on as tightly as possible, but I found myself slipping sideways, sideways until it seemed altogether easier just to let go. Then my face found a rock. We were camping at the time. A doctor made a house-call to the tent; the gash on my chin had become infected and I was running a fever.

 

 

 

 

I have full lips. That's what people say when they mean fat but don't want to cause offense. You cannot imagine what an insult it was to call somebody "fat lips" when we were children. Please, don't ask me why this should be the case. I mean, they're lips. How bad could it possibly be? We used to laughingly call each other frankfurter lips, my siblings and I, because we all have our dad's mouth. We were insulting each other, but ourselves too.

 

 

 

 

There is another scar on my top lip -- my full top lip. This time I was roller-skating down Buckingham Rise on a summer afternoon. That's what you did in the summer -- you skated and you biked and you took your coins to the ice cream van and you stayed out all day long. (You also, when you got a little older, smoked cigarettes at the golf course, and hung around the Cattle Market, and got caught shoplifting. But not yet. None of that had happened yet.)  I had built up speed coming down the hill. I swung around the corner onto Greenways, our street. I was confronted with the sight of two pedestrians just meters away and, not wanting to collide with them,  I chose to collide with a lamppost instead. That split-second decision resulted in a trip to Accident and Emergency, butterfly stitches, and the instruction to eat nothing solid for a few days; all food must come via a straw.

 

The next day at school a friend handed around sweets. Esther, my twin, said, "I'll have Hannah's!" and roughly snatched it from my hand. I cried about the way she snatched it. I would have given it to her if she'd just asked.

 

 

 

 

 

Noses are difficult to describe, unless they are in some way extraordinary. I suppose my nose is not extraordinary. I don't suppose you would say I was a candidate for a nose job anyway, but you might say that I could use a facial. My skin is usually clear, thanks to twice-daily antibiotics and an unhealthy amount of sun. The sunlight is problematic: it has helped my complexion but increased the lines on my forehead.

 

 

 

 

In France, you say "My eye!" as an expression of disbelief. I wonder about that...Todd says he can see it in my eyes when I'm lying but whenever he says that, I'm telling the truth.  Most of the time, at least. Eyes are strange when you really stare at them. I always thought my were brown, but when I looked they were much lighter than I expected. The only dark brown is a ring around the iris.

 

 

 

 That's as far as I got in my description of myself one page, but as a picture is worth a thousand words....