“Am I pretty?”, she looked at me with that all too familiar spark in her eyes, but something about her expression almost made me believe that she was being genuine.
“Of course you are.”, I said matter-of-factly, not really wanting to boost her, already way too high, confidence.
“Don’t lie to me, just because you’re my friend. If I were looking for flattery, I would have asked those whom I know not to be truthful, so be honest. Do you think I’m pretty?”, that playful shimmer in her eyes was gone. She didn’t want to provoke me, she didn’t want anything from me, except for the truth.
“We’re not friends, I wouldn’t say this, if it weren’t the truth. You’re beautiful, anyone would be happy to have you.”
She leaned forward, a seductive smile on her lips. “Does that mean you’d also be happy to have me?”
“If you’re asking if I’d like to sleep with you, then the answer is yes, I think any guy would. But if you’re asking me if I’m interested in you as a person, then no, I’m not and neither were any of your ex-boyfriends.”
She fell back into her chair, frowning. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means, that you’re worried about the wrong thing. You, optically speaking, are perfection, because that is everything you’ve ever been told to care about. You value yourself over how many boys you’ve been with and only ever question the traits and qualities you know you have. You were never taught to think of yourself as anything other than the object of someone else’s desires. I couldn’t care less about the person that you are, because there clearly isn’t more to it than what I can see. You are just the girl who’s great at fulfilling someone else’s needs.”
Our eyes met for a brief moment, but her expression was unreadable, she looked away, her hands fidgeting with a single strand of hair, that had come loose from her braid.
“There’s nothing wrong with that.”, she whispered, almost as if she was trying to convince herself instead of me.
“Sure there isn’t, it is your life, your reputation, there’s nothing stopping you from continuing like this. All I’m saying, is that if you want people to know who you really are, you’ll have to figure it out first.”
Her jaw tightened. “I know who I am.”
“You know who you’ve been told to be, that’s not the same thing. I may not like you, but I know that there should be more to you than you’ve let yourself explore.”
She didn’t look up, her mind had trailed off into thoughts I couldn’t read. I didn’t know if anything I had just said, had come through to her and I’ll never know if it ever will. Until that exact moment, I had never seen her as anything else, than the girl everyone had made her out to be and something about that distant look in her eyes told me that neither had she.
Still staring at seemingly nothing, she opened her mouth and paused for a second, as if she didn’t know if she should say anything at all. “You can believe what you want about me, I don’t expect you to understand anything about my life and the way I want it to be. But I’d rather not know who I am myself than having to explain myself for it.”
She looked back up at me and we shared a moment, both knowing that she was lying.
© Selima Chowdhury 2024-01-04