There is something so freeing about cutting your hair. taking away the power you hand to the male gaze.

There is something so liberating about looking ugly. The sacred act of severing the chains that bind you to your rusted wall. To the tilt of his lips. To the burning of your periocular skin, to the kisses that brand your vertebrae, to the slurs carved across your hips.

Beauty is a fidgety sort of existence. You yield to the symmetry of nature and she rewards you with a swirl of oxytocin. Have you ever experienced the joy of not worrying about the river of oil embalming your skin?

Girls that do not mold themselves into the laws of biophysics and supersymmetry find themselves walking the blurry lines between pariah and queen. Girls who squish their hollowed cheeks onto the window of department stores and wonder why they don't look like Adriana Lima. Girls that don't wince at the cold metal of shear, lacerating the eczema off their skin. Girls who lose their faces in a sea of blood-encrusted, poppy-parched hair. Rheum adorning the thick outgrowth of her lashes and the desiccated skin that lumbers under her eyes.

The ugly girl is a patchwork of potholes, crawling with maggots who smelled rot on her. She tried pouring honeyed syrup over her body. She tried becoming a popsicle to hide the fungus like kohl to her eyes. A raspberry popsicle in a pretty pink packet, pretty enough until the packet is torn. But she doesn't really care, because she knows how the hot pink of the plastic outshines her expiration date. Food poisoning is a risky business and only the prettiest can pull it off.

She doesn't shave her venus thighs, a bundle of white skin that raggedly meets the garden between her legs. She doesn't care if her ribs stick out too much, or if her ass is bubble or pyramidal; she just wants to be free. Unsightly and left alone to wander the sky. Left alone to draw triangle shaped grass on her walls and a sun with exactly five rays. Left alone with her pug-shaped nose and blemished corium. Left alone.

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She envies the girls caged inside her screen, their little black dresses riding high enough to parody camille claudel’s The Waltz. They reminded her of the venus pudica, drizzled with just enough modesty to sexualize.

Praxiteles, she imagined, is the modern Eros in a machine. Curating your feed, stocking it with dolls that have a pulse, paintings feigning stillness. I have never found pulse more attractive than in an age that fetishises stillness. The Mona Lisa wouldn't be half as expensive if she chose who to look into the eyes. If she could choose her appreciator.

Her screen is a boundless gallery of thirteen year old girls—tousled hair, smudged lipstick, messy eyeliner and lips parted just enough to convey a message. I am anadyomene; tip me open till you smell the brine of ocean foam.

The ugly girl carries an ocean inside herself. She can feel the sea creatures caged in her ribs, feeding on her flesh, sucking her villi—mistaking them for weed. She can feel the brine rise up her throat, foaming the opening of her nasal cavity. She seals her mouth shut so that the eels don't jump out. Venom is so much more beautiful when wrapped in silver skin. She can feel the carcasses of dead fish depositing over her vertebrae—painting it salmon. She has forgotten whose skin she wears, her body a menagerie of marine corpses. The salt seeps in through her cornea.

Ugly girls would choose the aquamarine seduction of the sea, the formless dance of jellyfishes, the sting of anemones over the surface and its sun any day. Because light, in its callous nature, illuminates. It illuminates the cracks along her skin, the cavity in her teeth, the mycelium breeding on her breasts. Because light illuminates the saprophytes, the decay, the tilt of desperation in her voice.

But the sea hides. It swallows her whole. The sea is her mother. She tells her she is pretty. Perfect as long as she is in the dark. Away from the light.

In the valleys of her cerulean painted fingers, life is paradise. In the depths of her cobalt bosom, there is rhapsody, filled with brine. In the voids of the infinite blue sea, life is a beautiful lie.