The loveliest face in the entire world

John is visiting "ex girlfriend" Lindsay at her dorm/apartment that she shares with a girl name Olivia. This is set mid 80s.

They called her a gifted artist because she liked to take pictures of herself. But John thought it was rather like taking credit for the work of another. For it was not her artistic choices that caught their eyes, but the way her nose titled towards the heavens ever so slightly, her carefully sculpted cheek bones, the engraved dimples that flanked her lips, lips that must have taken decades to design. She took credit for the work of some brilliant God who had taken an eternity to create the loveliest face in the entire world.

John imagined the divine being that had constructed her as a baker rolling out all imperfections of her doughy white skin on some magnificent counter top that contained the makings for all the creations in the world, tangible and not. He must have put into her eyes the same ingredients he used to make Tahitian seas, daydreams, and Sunday mornings.

He must have used the blue print of the night sky when he spread out the faint freckles across her face, for if you looked close enough you could almost make out the phoenix, just under Tucana.

He must have created a brand new color, solely for her cheeks alone, for no other shade of peach could possibly convey the sheer beauty and innocence of her bashfulness.

He must have decided to take the pearls intended to be placed in the deepest depths of the ocean and used them instead to carve out her perfect set of teeth, a shade brighter than white.

He must have used so much energy making a flawless human body, that by the time he got to her brain he said f**k it.

And this is why she thought that her s****y lighting and unimaginative camera angles made her an artist, but in fact, she was simply the most gorgeous idiot John had ever met. It was hard to stop himself from falling in love with her, but then he reminded himself that falling in love with Olivia would be as ridiculous as falling in love with the Mona Lisa or a brick wall.

He felt an awkward sort of misplaced animosity towards Olivia that both confused and startled him. Why couldn’t he look at her and appreciate her pretty face like poets appreciated night skies? Not even that. Why couldn’t he just lust after her like a man and appreciate her like he appreciated steak?

It wasn’t as though he was jealous of her; they were in two completely different species as far as John was concerned. It would be like a giraffe being jealous of a sofa; it just didn’t make any sense.

It was a gut feeling he had, he sensed that the genius of nature would not have made something masked so beautifully, had it nothing to hide. There was something her beauty concealed, and John had never trusted a stranger less in his life. Olivia was an idiot sure, he had heard dozens of stories confirming this fact, and on the one occasion he had met her it was blatantly obvious she had nothing intelligent to contribute to their brief conversation let alone to the world. She lacked inflection in her speech, her personality a dull beige, and her eyes never quite concentrated. He almost wondered if she’d grown so accustomed to relying on her beauty that it had stunted any sort of personality growth past the age of three. Yet. He sensed there was something inside quiet, rude, stupidly gorgeous Olivia that was inherently destructive and it frightened him.

John felt bad tip toeing around her apartment ripping her very soul apart in his head after only having met her once. He felt bad about thinking such disgustingly rude thoughts towards a complete stranger. He felt bad that his mind tended to wander towards dark places, and that Olivia was who he took this weird suppressed anger out on.

John tried his very hardest not to judge people and he operated on the cliché that if you didn’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all. He had even tried to stay true to this motto in his thoughts, for he felt it made him a more peaceful person if he tried to see it from the other person’s perspective before making any hasty judgments. In an attempt to rid his mind of all this garbage he had only bottled it up, and now it seemed only to be focused solely on one human being, Olivia. He knew he should have tried his hardest to ‘walk a mile in her shoes’ but to be honest there was nothing John hated more than her obnoxiously yellow converse all stars, how gaudy.

He stepped nimbly over a Pringles can and leapt over a pile of clothes into Lindsay’s room. Immediately the smell of rotting food and nail polish disintegrated and all that remained was the slight essence of Chanel No 5. Memories made bitter with time came to mind but quickly John dismissed them and tried his hardest not to let on that he was the least bit nostalgic about their youthful rebellion they had once mistaken as love. Lindsay smiled brightly as she flopped lazily into her unmade bed; she looked wily and much more confident than when he had last seen her. He wondered what her mother would think of her messy room, and his presence in it. It was no secret that her mother had grown to despise John, and that the feeling was somewhat mutual. The last time he had seen Lindsay it had made him sick, seeing her not as she was, but as her mother used to be. He could see her slowly molding into the woman her mother was; and what saddened him more was that he could see her mother as being just like the girl he had once had an acute infatuation with, in her own youth. He saw them as being both young and free, and old and bitter all at once and it made him queasy. He thought by now she would have been completely immersed in some delusion of suburban bliss, but instead she had taken a step back. She wasn’t sixteen and angry at the world, but she wasn’t thirty and bleak.  Lindsay had settled into somebody he respected, she was smarter, and he had to wonder if Princeton had anything to do with it. Had she really gone to college and become a revolutionary for her time, or was this just her falling back into old habits in his company?

He looked around the room and wanted to say something, but he couldn’t find words. It was then that John acknowledged for the first time that he and Lindsay were now, and maybe had always been, complete strangers. She was honestly a friend, one he liked to think he would have for life, but in all truth they barely knew each other. Everything they had ever shared was a manifestation of an angry youth and hardly the true feelings either of them had, especially now after they had both done a great deal of growing up. Her familiar face was comfortable more than anything else, and he appreciated her presence more than anything she could ever say. They swapped silence for a few minutes, counting the differences in each other, before Lindsay stood up and tripped over a high heel to her box of records. She pulled one out and put it on and immediately John felt his cheeks burn. It was the song that had played the first time he had ever kissed her. It was one of the more romantic moments in the era of John and Lindsay, and he couldn’t help but be embarrassed at the thought of his inexperienced trials of love and romance.

He sort of hated whatever it was she was doing. He sort of wanted to leave. He fought hard to look her in the eyes, and when he did the most wonderful thing happened, a wave of calm that he hadn’t realized he’d been craving washed over him. For the first time in months he felt content, because for an unexpected moment the awkwardness of life ceased to exist. For a moment there was nobody to impress, nobody he felt strained to communicate with, no problems that needed immediate solving. It was in Lindsay’s eyes he found peace in his s**t life, for a moment.

The strange thing about Lindsay was that unlike most people’s beauty hers did not fade, it evolved and continually renewed. Even though John had noted that her years of buttery baby skin had passed, he was struck by how much he preferred the now visible pores on her cheeks. The couple years of age were only detectable by somebody who has spent a summer memorizing every contour of her face, who had named every freckle, and kissed every cell. He knew that if he saw her in fifty years, her skin leathery and inscribed with time, he would still be in awe of the natural loveliness she possessed, Lindsay was timeless.

There was one thing missing that made his heart lurch when he had first walked in the door and she had greeted him with that brilliant smile of hers. The gap between her front two teeth was gone. He felt as though something near and dear to him had been stolen, taken away without his consent. There was a brief shameful moment of wanting to cry, and then when that passed he was pissed.

John thought most people were only beautiful because of their flaws. What made people unique was their imperfections. And it wasn’t how many they had, but the combination of their imperfections that made them different from each other. And it’s wild how different he imagined people looked though different people’s eyes. There were seven billion people on planet Earth and he thought he probably didn’t appear the same to any of them. Like most things in life, perfection was viewed by John as relative.  

It was sort of a contradiction that perfection was made out of the perfect mix of imperfections. It was different for everybody. He thought that’s what a soul mate must be though, two people who saw each other perfectly.

What made Lindsay his was stupid little things as trivial as centimeters between teeth, and yet now, his vision of her had been clouded. He knew that he would never see her as he did years ago, but still he thought that maybe if she had looked the same as before he might be able to convince himself that they were in love again, even if only for a few minutes. He might be able to fall into the sort of mindless delusion that so many others seemed to be able to do so easily. He wanted so badly to be a wickedly happy idiot, he wanted to be able to push reality into the back of his mind and live in the now socially acceptable fantasy of true love, but for the life of him he could not. He wondered how many people pretended to be happy, how many thought they actually were, and how many truly were. He wondered if it was possible to convince yourself that your life was something it wasn’t, to convince yourself you wanted things you didn’t want. Was it possible to lie to yourself about something as monumental as being satisfied? Did people ignore their true desires, or like him were they haunted by them daily? How was everybody in the world not slowly losing their minds? Is that was suburban bliss was, a bunch of people who had succumb to the idea that they would never be truly satisfied in life? Were they all so numb that they smiled their gapless smiles and lived through memories of past lovers, lived through the few moments in life when hope had still existed in their now decaying minds?

One of John’s biggest fears in life was the notion that he might never be satisfied. That he might die having wanted more like the glutton he was. But he had long ago realized that he was not the kind of person who was capable of accepting such things, no matter how horribly he yearned to. John would never stop searching for satisfaction in life.

It was like this. His heart was one person and his brain was another. He existed somewhere in between and not as a combination of the two, because then he thought he would have had a more neutral view on life. But he didn’t, he was just two extremes bouncing back and forth. The dreamer and the pragmatist. He was legendary, and nobody would ever know he existed. He was born yesterday, and he’d already died.  His heart craved perfection, his brain looked for satisfaction.

He thought life must only be beautiful because it’s ugly.

While he wanted to look at Lindsay and be taken with the beauty of her new smile he could not. His mind being the kind to constantly over think and create nonexistent meanings could not be happy with Lindsay’s new dental work, he was only made to feel gloomy with the idea that Lindsay’s teeth were in fact a huge solidification that her life was everything it shouldn’t be. His heart hurt for her when he imagined her thinking that he might see her and think she looked better, but in fact the teeth only underlined the fact that Lindsay’s life was inevitably headed in the direction of doom.

He felt as though maybe they shared a desire to be closer than they ever really were, like perhaps they were both willing to pretend like what they had was the real thing. He sensed Lindsay was scared because she was drifting away from him, not him, but from her past self. They clung to the relationship not because they saw something remarkable in their love, but because they saw something remarkable in their youth. They shared the memory of having blind naïve hope together, and that’s what made it impossible to let go of each other. John thought the connection to first romances was not the connection to the person, but the ability to recount gorgeous ignorant bliss together, to have somebody that could attest to the fact that at some point in your life it had actually existed.

That’s why the music was playing in the room. Not because Lindsay wanted to kiss John, but because she wanted him to let her know that he remembered what they felt, that even if it wasn’t love it was fantastic and it was real.

John wondered if there was any hope for Lindsay. He thought that the only thing holding her back from living her life was fear, some sort of indefinable ever present potent fear that controlled her. Perhaps she did not know what to be scared of, yet still she fled like everybody else into some weird blue collar world of denial. Why was it so easy for people to act so goddamn complacent in the world? How could she sit here bobbing her head to the music of something she was slowly giving up on and not be in absolute hell? He felt as though he was at a wake, instead of imagining Lindsay’s lips on his John could only stand paralyzed deciding weather or not to mourn the loss of Lindsay’s life. As each second passed he became angrier at her for giving up so easily.

He couldn’t stand here and reminisce something she was willing to give up so effortlessly. The fact that she had invited him over meant something. Who knew if it was a call for help? Who knew if she could even be helped at this point? And if she did what could he do about it?

He couldn’t decide if they were in this together or not, he couldn’t decide if he owed it to Lindsay to remind her that she still had a lifetime to indulge in her passions. Lindsay’s role in John’s life meant more to John than Lindsay as a person. He knew that it was a nasty truth to confess, and that admitting to the fact that Lindsay could have been easily substituted with any self righteous seventeen year old girl without it significantly changing his life was not something nice to acknowledge. But John was finding that the easiest way to achieve happiness was to stop pretending fiction was fact.

Lindsay had not changed John’s life, but alas he was presented with the opportunity to change hers, and so John decided that they would indeed be in this together from that point on. He would do his best to save Lindsay’s life. 

Author's Note

any and all notes are welcomed and encouraged !

This is not the beginning of the novel, I haven't yet decided its place :)