Here is the third installment in the ‘Erasing Jesus’ series by p.s. tryon.
Part 1
Part 2
The problem wasn’t that the tsunami of age finally reached her shore, rushing in with full impact. The problem was the constant pressure. To look younger, ageless even.
She started her new face routine, carefully dotting the bags under her eyes from a cheap bottle of hyaluronic acid, the best she could buy. Thought about movie stars’ plastic faces, plastic smiles on magazine covers. Old faces so smooth no lines not even a sparrow foot at the edge of the eye.
They make us stare at them, she thought, a taste of the hyaluronic acid on her tongue. Eighty-year-old women without wrinkles. Women with fortunes to spend on their outer appearance, the organ of skin.
My grandchildren see a real human face, and it shines with love and my eye wrinkles twinkle.
But all those whispers, filling her head when she least expected. Comments she heard from children even when she was a young adult, her own children reacting to the elderlies’ hands and faces, remarking on how folded and spotted and OLD they appeared. She had seen babies cry in fear when great grandma reached for them, scarecrow arms stretching toward them in space.
Really, what do the children see? She wondered, staring at the mirror. Maybe love in the absence of wrinkles. It’s a lie! She wanted to tell them. No one is doing them any favors, pretending a fake face is life.
The eye of society, social media, AI graphics, phone cameras that erased the details of a life lived long. And the goal? Was it to defy the odds and believe the ultimate lie: you will never die? The same one with which the sneaky serpent beguiled Eve.
What an exercise in wasted time! she thought. We earn these wrinkles. You don’t get to live this long without the battle scars to show how much you have conquered. Besides, we are all going to the same place. Sepulchres of one sort or another.
The futility of the hyaluronic acid made her laugh out loud. Who do I think I am? she asked herself. “My name is Kate,” she said aloud. “Grama Kate.” She faced herself in the mirror and tossed the bottle into the mouth of the trash.
Erasing Jesus, Part 1
Erasing Jesus, Part 2
