The Family Portrait

I have a thing against confident men. Don’t get me wrong—I do not hate them. I am just amazed by their sheer arrogance. To look life in the face and turn it to stone, Medusa-like. To smile at a camera and not be fazed by the lights flashing millisecond by millisecond. To wear jewelry and not fear that it will slip from sweat on their wrists, their necks, or their fingers.

The sheer audacity to live authentically, with no care for how they look or how they feel people perceive them.

Selah

I grew up an ugly duckling, you see. I was the one who took the pictures but didn’t care to be in them. I looked at my twin brother and wished I could photocopy his face and slap it on mine.

Selah

“If we were identical, whose face would we share?” I asked my twin one day as we walked back from a Wednesday evening service at church. A commercial bike rider honked at us with an urgency, as if he too wanted to know the answer.

I shook my head at the rider. No, we would not ride with him.

“Mine, of course,” my twin replied, smiling.

His voice floated away as he spoke, echoing into the evening breeze like the prayers I’d made earlier.

I don’t remember the rest of that conversation, but I do remember believing so hard that I’d wake up the next day with his face as mine.

When I didn’t, I looked at each individual feature on my face—my uneven jawline, my hooded eyes, my big ears, my lips, my nose, and the scanty eyelashes on each eyelid—and forced myself to love them.

There had to be an explanation, I believed. I was adopted. I looked like my grandfather. I would outgrow my ugliness. I’d grow a beard soon. I am only light-skinned, hence an opportunity for the accentuation of these sour phenotypes.

And so, as the years passed, I crossed each item off the list. I wasn’t adopted. I am only painted with my grandfather’s complexion. I will never grow a beard like my brothers’. I am just ugly.

Selah.

“Oh, you’re not an ugly duckling,” my sister said one day as she laughed, throwing her head back.

Her front teeth are gapped, just like my mother’s. She has beautiful skin like my mother too, and she inherited my mother’s dark patch of skin with tiny bumps that itch every now and then. It is like the farmland a woman gives her daughter as a parting gift on her wedding day.

I have it too, but it’s not on my left knee like theirs. It’s on my left elbow. This is why I say I was haphazardly thrown into my mother’s womb. The oven timer was just about to go off when God heard my mother ask for twins, and He hurriedly crammed my half-done body between the first and second racks.

“There, there,” he said. “Now, she will be happy.”

Selah.

My brothers look like my father’s side of the family—box-shaped heads and a sharp ‘V’ hairline. For years, my hairline was straight, but two years ago, I started noticing the faint outline of a 'V.' I hope I am not imagining it.

Selah.

“You look just like your mother!” My ex told me one day, his eyes lit up in surprise. I smiled because I know my mother is beautiful. I just am not, so I was confused.

“You look like a solid 7/10,” he told me one cool evening, as we tried to catch fireflies to wish on.

“You’re so unromantic,” I chided as I hit his arm playfully.

That day, I drowned myself deep in shallow thoughts.

Am I really a 7?

Am I not deserving of a 10?

Is my mother then a 7?

Did I misjudge my mother’s beauty? Is she…not gorgeous?

A gasp.

Am I a fool for being with someone who didn’t think I was a 10 to them?

Am I ever going to be a 10 to him? To anyone?

Selah.

I saw my father’s picture from the 80s. He was shyly touching the statue of a naked woman. The sepia brown of the photo revealed his coy smile, the pale whiteness of the woman’s body, and his long graduation gown. He looked just like my twin brother now.

Selah.

My father’s brothers all look alike—photocopied versions of one another in different fonts. Some thick, and some slim—just like my father. His father married three wives, and his mother bore men who looked the same. The women, not so much.

And so, my father's sons look like each other, except me.

My twin brother has his toothy grin but drank from the well of flighty tempers. My father is slow to anger, you see.

My older brother also has my father’s teeth. A crooked mandible. The signature look of my grandfather’s sturdy line.

I carry fragments. I am gifted the distorted version of my mother’s face, the complexion of my grandfather, a perfect dentition, and borrowed anxiety from a childhood of doubt, self-loathing, and insecurity.

Selah.

I am attracted to confident men. They also scare me. What happens when we step in front of a camera and my lips fail me?

I am not one of those people who take pictures with a stoic expression, and it comes out looking good as fuck. I mean, I’ve tried, but I looked drunk in most of them. So, I have given up.

I smile. I have to. I part my lips slightly, then fully. I have to make them see my teeth. They have to see my teeth. Then they’d be jealous, I think. Then they’d like me. Then they’d not notice I have a big forehead or big lips.

No, just perfect, white teeth.

Selah

“Your smile looks forced,” the family photographer muttered, tilting his head as though he could fix me with a new angle. His words were soon drowned by the crunch of my mother’s sego gele as she tucked a peeking piece underneath a tight knot. And my confidence, fragile as a lone twig, snapped in that moment.

Next time you go to my family home, you will see on a family portrait my faded smile, next to perfect faces, and a headstone that reads:

“Here lies the confidence of a self-loather, whose head was shot with words from his broken demons.”

Selah