Beauty

Foster's beautiful. Foster is beautiful. He is beautiful. I am not as attractive. I'm sure of it. I have far too much body hair. There's hair all across my chest and in a line from my navel to groin. My eyebrows are akin to caterpillars and my facial hair grows much faster than seems fair or likely. 

Blessedly my back is hair free, but I have yet to reach forty and that's usually when that type of thing sets in.

Foster is nothing like that. His chest and stomach are hairless. His face stays smooth for what seems like days after he shaves. His eyebrows are finely shaped little arches and all of his hair is fine and silky, thin.

He's only 5'7'', but he wears it like a graceful height, he puts those 6' models to shame. My own height of 6' just makes me feel too tall and too there. I feel as if my hands are too large for my arms and my feet too large for my legs. But with Foster it's different. His hands are dainty without being feminine. And his feet are just this side of small, enough to be cute and not so much that they look like a child's.

My eyes are brown like his, but not as perfect as his are. I have astigmatism, and so I am cursed to hide behind hideous glasses that make my eyes seem buggy. He'll most likely never need glasses, and I'm greatful. His face is far to pretty to sit behind bulky metal frames and glass lenses.

I'm not attractive. I'm always too much of something or not nearly enough. I've never been blessed with something genuinly inbetween. During high school, when mother still sat rigidly next to me in church I would never hesitate to ponder God's choices regaurding me when mother prompted me to.

We'd arrive half an hour early every Sunday and every Sunday she would nod to me and I would think. The topics varied, my apperance, my popularity or rather, my lack thereof, my absent father, the memories of a dark haired woman I couldn't place, and sometimes I even thought about the fleeting ticking I'd hear in my head. But even with my wide variety of things to think about I almost always returned to the same conclusion.

God was punishing me. Perhaps not for what I had done in the past, but for what I was going to do, for what I was going to become. I had to be born, perhaps to set something greater than myself into motion, or perhaps just to be made an example of. But I was sure, from the tender age of fifteen I sat in pews of my church, alongside mother, and thought to myself with great conviction that I was born to suffer. That I was being punished by God and that even suicide was not good enough for me, because I needed to suffer, because God made me the way I was.

My belief in God thesedays, and subsequently my adherance to his commandments, is neither here nor there. Surely enough I did become a horrible man. I became a man who deserved the horrible things from my past. If anything that should have been enough to return me to the strictly devout Catholic I had been before, but my resolved wavered.

God had sent me Foster. And maybe He sent me a man because He wanted me to sin more. Because He doesn't want to risk absolute repentanence. He could have sent Foster to me in order to more blatantly point out our differences. Or maybe He sent me no one. Perhaps Foster found me all on his own.

Foster...

"Hey beautiful." I blush and pull away from his embrace.

"I'm not beautiful Foster, you are. You're perfect." His answering smile is crooked. The dead nerves in his lip make it hook down on one side. He brushes his fingers over it, over that beautiful smile.

"I'm not perfect, just look at my lip for one."

"But I like your lip that way."

"And I love you, the way that you are."