"I don't think you know what beautiful means so I'll show you."
Corny. So cheesy. What would he show her to explain what 'beauty' means? He wasn't sure he himself even understood what it meant...but he had read those words somewhere and had liked the way they sounded. He had imagined himself saying them to some girl. He didn't have a girl then; he still didn't have one but he imagined himself in that pretty-words-and-warm-feelings state all the same. "You're pathetic!" he scoffed at himself. How he often ends up painting himself into these imaginary scenarios always vexed him and yet he didn't know how to stop. He desperately wanted to write beauty into existence. In his lifeless existence to be exact. He wanted to love. He wasn't sure on the love part though. What if love isn't beautiful? It would ruin his composition.
If he were able to recreate his life-and he prayed for that endlessly to the infamously merciful God-he would make sure that every part of it was beautiful. So fucking beautiful that his father would have no choice but to acknowledge him, as a person of worth, as an artist, and forgive his six-feet-under-heavy-earth wife for her vanity, her loss. After all, she may have lusted after the fickle beauty of the world, and decimated everything in her efforts to make it her own, but she had given birth to an artist that could, and would, create timeless beauty. Yes, he would show his father that not only would he make something out of himself but the world would also be all the better for it. And his mother, well, she would be grateful that her son, whom she cursed for carrying the ugliness of the world, was atoning for her miserable existence through his creations. Yes, he needed to create beauty. And then, perhaps, he could show his yet-to-arrive girl his creations and claim "this is beauty!"...and maybe add "you're more beautiful than all these combined" if he was in the mood, in that tear-through-me-and-numb-me-apart mood. Because he did have those cravings. When he exhausts himself with all this 'beauty' talk and his imaginary plans of how to conquer the world through this beautiful creations, he gets these urges that immediately need silencing. Once he starts hearing his mother's words, biting through his walls and burning him slowly, starting from the center, he gets frenzied, craving to end it all. To numb.
Ugly is not looking in the mirror and finding yourself inadequate or horrific. Ugly is your mother wincing at the sight of you, spitting on you for all the bitterness you've caused, denying you her warmth or existence for the life you took (away)from her. Ugly is a father who didn't give you his or knew your name, who pronounced you worthless and might-as-well-be-dead just like the one who birthed you. Ugly is bone-deep. Ugly is negation.
For God's sake, how was he supposed to know, forget create, beauty when he was born into ugly?
"There is no beauty, so I'll show you ugly," he thinks. And he knows what he can show. Himself. So ugly.
