Portrait of a Girl

Her name is so euphonious, it makes you stop dead in your tracks to say it again. She is an exquisite portrait she has painted herself: solem grey eyes, a lonely mouth, two delicate hands to rest on a worn weary waist. She sighs, and her lashes sweep clean the universe, burdened and slow with centuries of wisdom caught in cobwebs. Every movement she makes aches with the with the pain of being beautiful, of being adored.  Accounts love and lust and cruelty tumble so gracefully out of her mouth, with none of the awkwardness that accompanies spontaneity. Girls, boys, men, they see this painting, so precisely pointilated, with no sign of a brush, and take it for a photograph. But in her mind she holds only jars of paint; every color for every emotion, disguising some beastly abstraction, or perhaps some unbearably beautiful image of God that is her true nature.