Now let’s talk about your face, Peter - and then I’ll try not to mention it again. I just can’t underscore its importance enough. This face had a bewitching power over me that largely directed my actions over the next several years.
It had all the science going for it - symmetry, you name it. Five times during the years we dated, you were approached by model scouts on the street because of the head-turning, jaw-dropping work of art on the front of your head, so it wasn’t just me.
But everyone has their face. Someone might like an Arnold Schwarzenegger type of face, and someone else might like a round and dimple-cheeked dumpling of a face. And in that way, your face was my own personal kryptonite. It looked like darkness, drama, art. It looked like a haunted writer-face. I should despise it for the things it made me do, the years I lost in its orbit. But I don’t.
I’d been beguiled by beauty before, but never so obsessed. Here was a specimen so fucking perfect that I had to do things like buy an analog camera, fill it with black and white film and spend weeks taking dramatic closeups of it in the most awkward ways.
We’d be out walking the asphalt path around a local reservoir for exercise….and I’m holding up my camera, trying to steady it against the shudders of my rapid backwards footsteps so I can play it cool, be nonchalant, capture some candid silhouettes without you noticing. But secretly, you notice. And not even secretly. You deliberately stop to look stoically into the distance at something - maybe a tiny bird in the branches of an oak tree - snap snap, a few more student-art shots of that glorious sculpture of bone structure, lips and lashes. You relish the warm spotlight of my lens.
And when you’re driving my car, you keep your eyes on the road, pretending not to see me in the passenger seat like paparazzi, telescope lens fixed and focused on your profile. Pretend you’re not basking in the heat of my rabid attention - and that’s cool, because it makes me less self conscious. Snap snap. Won’t stop, can’t stop.
Suddenly, I’m a photographer driven to capture a handsomeness so exquisite that it simply must be documented - and yet no level of documentation feels adequate. I need proof of these jutting cheekbones and porcelain skin, the eyebrows and deep-set eyes with their built-in drama. Lips as beautiful as any woman’s lips might hope to be, delicately curved, perfectly placed, full. Proof for who? Maybe proof for me? Proof that someone this stunning was mine to hold, to kiss, to call my boyfriend. Maybe I just wanted to hoard that face, should it ever go away.
I am almost embarrassed by my compulsion to capture your beauty - but not enough to stop me from developing several rolls of film at the local print shop of nothing but silhouettes and frontals, full packs of headshots and close ups. Not too embarrassed to stand in front of the camera shop guy, thumbing through the envelopes of glossy face prints with glee - too impatient to wait until I was safely hiding in my car. Unashamed, I even put them in the clear plastic sleeves of a flip-book that I keep on a shelf in our bedroom and flip through regularly, marveling at its magic.
And though I hate to paint, I buy a canvas and acrylics in the hope that I can capture my muse in another medium. Having never painted a portrait before nor since, I was compelled to reproduce your face on a large canvas board, using one of my 100 photos as a reference. It took me two solid days of staring at that photo propped on a music stand, canvas propped on a chair covered in a bedsheet, to grid it out first in pencil, sketch a dry run, and then apply the paint with no skills nor training, tentative tiny brushstroke by brushstroke. My painting, though amateurish, seemed to capture the shadows, light and theatrics of your cheeks, lips, eyes and I thought, wow, even an ugly painting of you couldn’t help but be art. So I hung that garish homage to your face in our bedroom as our only decor.
For five years, this three-quarters side portrait - like a runway model mid-spin, or a lover casting a backward glance as they saunter away, hung there alone on the largest facing wall, unabashedly displaying my fascination for your face to every friend who popped by, every random party guest, every roommate who cycled through. It hung there for you to wake to and fall asleep to, its come-hither eyes piercing us from across the room as we lay in bed.
Years after we broke up you’d say to me: why couldn’t you ever tell me that you found me attractive?