How To Start Liking Your Face

You start liking your face by remembering the time as a teen when you stayed at your “pretty aunt’s” house and in the morning you saw her real face, without the glossy pink lipstick and thick foundation and blush and eye shadow and mascara.

You loved her fancy doll face framed by the blown-out hair and half-covered by giant sunglasses, sipping from a bucket-size cup of diet coke that’s 90% ice in the cupholder of the monstrous black SUV with the tinted windows. You do love that version, but what you remember most is how in the morning pretty aunt has become stunningly beautiful overnight, sitting on the couch, hair pulled back from a face that looks much softer when not outlined and filled in and textured, nursing the youngest of a gaggle of girls, one prettier than the next, all with thick, shiny hair and olive skin and impossibly long eyelashes and heart lips.

The morning, though, is quiet and gentle when they’re all bedheads and pajamas and morning breath and sleepy eyes and nobody…