If you’re definitely still alive but you think that an important part of you has died, can you hold a memorial for that part of you that feels over or vanished? I want to have a funeral for my looks. My good looks. No, that is not quite what I mean.
I won’t say that I ever thought I was really beautiful. Well part of it was the era in which I was a young woman ….the standard beauty was Doris Day or Debbie Reynolds or Elizabeth Taylor or some light skinned girl with a small pert nose and fresh “American” looks. I was definitely too exotic, too ethnic, too messy ….too poor.
I am not totally being honest, because I knew very well that men did not really agree. What I mean, what I want to say without being amazingly crude I knew that they found me attractive. I mean they found me very desirable.
I knew that if we that is he and I got to the point of discovery that is if he saw me, touched me, felt me ….you know if he and I were intimate that they (I mean he in the old fashioned sense of it) would be delighted, enthralled and quite excited. That power or sexual allure is quite different than the beauty that wins beauty contests or makes your girl friends jealous. I remember one of my girl friends (quelle bitch when you really think about) said to me: “ You are almost pretty.”
Well, here it is….I have finally lost it. The “it” that was my magic…my certitude of my power over the male species.
I know I need to be clothed and cloaked and I want to hide my aging form. I love loose shirts that skim my thickened waist, sleeves that hide the wrinkly skin near the top of my arms, skirts that skim the discoloration around my ankles and the varicose veins that gently pop on the inner surface of my legs. I love flat boots and shoes that make me feel safe and steady rather than high heels that make my legs look longer and my feet more arched. I might even start wearing gloves over my aging hands and/or scarves around my softening and sliding neckline.
For the first time in my life I look better in clothes than naked.
This is totally and unremorsefully unPC: I am not reconciled that I will never again see that special gleam in the eye of a man. I miss the appreciation and celebration of my desirability. Yes, I mourn that I can no longer embody the goddess in her full glorious power. Perhaps, it is my feminine pride that needs burying.