Ugly
How I feel in a headlong crush
My crush on you makes every word that tumbles out of my mouth a big, giant, ugly fur ball.
No, scratch that.
My crush on you makes me feel like a big, giant, ugly fur monster, like the little green fellow on the “Just for Laugh Gags” tv show, only a more sickly green and bumpier and sadder. The slips of my tongue (i.e. every interaction with you) sound like unintentional ugly noises that would come out of the monster I feel that I am, something between howls of pain, yelps of longing, and the immediate embarrassment when I realise that the ugly sound came from me.
I want to scarf it all back down, the bald, misshapen, unsightly words that tumble out of me, that didn’t mean to but couldn’t be helped, that were some laughably feeble attempts to build a bridge of connection to you.
But what kind of bridge would such uneven words build? They materialise and fall higgledy-piggledy on top of each other, a lumpy mess, all fragmented and sandy and utterly useless in making something horizontal to hold my weight and cross the chasm towards you.
Your beauty makes me feel like a beast, who roars into the darkness of his dank cave but who falls mute before your lightness and delicateness.
If ever I start to speak in a less monster-like way again (assuming I speak at all), make no mistake that it wouldn’t be because I’d gotten over you, but that there are a thousand belts and buckles strapping my alligator-like jaws together, and my tongue is nailed to the roof of my mouth with hours of practiced civility.
Maybe over time, that monster might become smaller and smaller, with so many restraints holding it back and down in all directions. Maybe over time, it might even turn from a huge, ugly, frightful thing into a cute, harmless little ugly pet that neither of us would mind, house-trained and leashed.
Until then, I strain against the straps of propriety, always alarmed and helpless by how much the attraction to beauty, to your beauty anyhow, buoys and boosts me beyond what I can indulge in. I let you blow past me, an ethereal wind, only glad that I can sometimes come to revel in a gust or two while I roam this earth.
And I look to the day I might break my own beastly curse,
that I may approach you as I really am, in true form,
equally confident and quiet and beautiful as you are,
and no longer be
ugly.
