My Girlfriend Sends Me A Picture First Thing Every Morning
Prose Towards a More Raw and Uncensored Life — Taking Off The Masks We Wear
“I like dirt. I like filth. I like raw emotion. I like concrete reality. I like naked existence. I like unorthodox versions of aesthetic beauty and individual character. I like individuality and autonomy. I like the unpredictability. I like chaos. I like untamed circumstance. I like love. I like the real world just as it is. I like complexity. I like entropy. I like the absurd. I like that which is not dolled-up and neatly packaged for pleasure. Pseudo-reality does nothing for me. The virtual is useless. Give me the real.”
Since the beginning of our relationship, my girlfriend has sent me a picture of herself first thing in the morning every morning, per my request — these are the moments of life that I profoundly enjoy and thoroughly bask in for their warmth. For a while, it was every single day — in hindsight, it feels like this went on for three months straight without missing a day…
Every single day…
Those words quoted from a post I made online in February of 2015 seemed the most fitting to encapsulate the idea that I’m about to share with you, the idea that there are some of us who love life as it is, reality as it is, naked, incomplete, and pure in their impurities.
Aren’t these the moments that make life…well…life? Who’s to tell me what beauty is supposed to be? Can’t I make that determination on my own?
I was tired of the world telling me what’s pure, what’s supposed to be beautiful — I wanted to find that out for myself. I wanted to see things and people as they really were, refusing to hide from the truth that lies subtly-hidden behind the somewhat artificial realities that we prop up. The discreet prison walls we live behind can be maddening, on occasion. This isn’t to say that things like make-up or doing our hair a certain way is fake or fraudulent in any way — just distorted, and distorted in such a way that can be seen as preferable. But what if I preferred the real?
I can only suggest that anyone, and everyone, try out this little experiment so long as their partners are willing — it’s not only eye-opening, both literally and figuratively speaking, but we get to treat ourselves and others to the unadulterated beauty that lies within each and every one of us — yes, even us men, too. I was surprised at the joy she found whenever I returned fire with another gritty image, with one eye cracked half-open and the other still shut tucked away somewhere in a dream. While I won’t speak for absolutely everyone, I will say that, on a general whole, I think we’d all be surprised to find out just how great our partners look when they’re their most “them.”
…and more importantly, we’ll communicate something powerful — that it’s actually them we’re attracted to, no matter how blemished, no matter what their self-image looks like, no matter how they view their own insecurities…
It all began when I initially asked her if she might send me one, a photo of her waking up first thing, hair wrangled and disheveled, makeup a mess, but still powerfully beautiful — I didn’t care — I wanted her. If I’m being honest here, I personally think that this is when she’s at her most beautiful, still until this day — when her beauty is untarnished by the additions of cover-up and lipstick, when her hair isn’t quite perfect — when she’s beautifully human.
If you can’t love the human in someone, you don’t actually love them.
This doesn’t mean that she or any woman can’t be absolutely stunning with make-up on or certain outfits, which people often try very hard to apply and make themselves look the best they can, both in their eyes an in the eyes of others; but the fact remains, that I will always adore this private, natural, unadulterated version of her a bit more — that’s just how it is to crave the real.
…and I was as hungry as I was insistent…
Let’s cut to the chase…let me see you, the real you, as you are, and I promise to be tender and careful with it, clutching you in my embrace like a delicate flower — laced with a vicious poison. Let’s skip the pretenses and just be ourselves. I feel if more people lived this way the world might be a better place. No doubt we’d understand each other better.
Why do I feel like too many in this world try to hide themselves, understandably, considering the way some others treat us — but is this the way it should be? Alas, that is the question for another day, and the reader to decide. She obliged my request and it was liberating for both of us to be able to be and feel so raw with one another, even at the beginning of a budding relationship.
The following day, I received another, and then another. I shamelessly instigated these pictures, soliciting them as they came, almost begging for a new version of the same pretty face that I adored so much to come through my notifications, my emails, my messenger apps, etc.; it was real. I was hooked on the realist of faces, one which didn’t seek to hide itself — but to just be.
I wanted to replicate the experience times infinity. There was a softness to her skin, and a contrast which screamed at me out of the shadows of her features, the natural contours of her face which didn’t lie rested behind an overlayed image, no matter how slight or translucent. Photo filters are great, but photo filters have their time and place, and I never wanted her to feel like she needed to hide behind a filter…
As the images flooded, we grew together and the distances between us every morning felt smaller and less important — in a very real way, it felt like we awoke with one another every single morning whether we actually did or not. We started every single day together virtually, as we would waking together in person, no matter what seemingly oceanic abyss stood between us in the restrictive world of time and space — the continuum was circumvented, proximity had been rendered obsolete. The intimacy and raw nakedness were palpable, and it spoke to the Paleolithic version of myself hidden somewhere in the dark and murky depths of my mind — screaming from the very DNA of my genes. May we shed this artificial world that’s been built up around us without our consent, at least every once in a while — let us run free and tear down these prison walls.
We continue this here and there these days when time permits, and it’s still never lost its magic even for a moment. Even when we get busy, a thoughtful first-thing-in-the-morning picture is sure to always make my day, and take me back to those moments that only we shared together. That’s what happiness feels like when things don’t lose their magic and you can enjoy them again and again.
These images will always be a reminder that we’re not lying to ourselves and we’re not building something on a facade or appreciating only certain aspects of one another, and to me, that has meaning.
The world screams into our ears all day, every day, telling us what’s pure, what’s right, what we’re supposed to like, who we’re supposed to appreciate, the things we’re supposed to value, and among those things are ideas of how people are supposed to look — I wanted to tear down those idols, so I asked for an accomplice to help me to subtly reject the world’s idea of how we’re supposed to be so well-kept all the time. It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.
In the end, there’s very little that you can say to someone as powerful as, “I like you for who you are — I need nothing more.”
The other night I said to her, “I wish you could see yourself through my eyes, as beautiful as you are to me, untarnished by your insecurities and moments of self-doubt.” She replied, unhesitatingly, that she does…and I think I know why. It’s because we never had any pretenses about who we are, no conditions, no rules, no limits, just pointed stares and pure enjoyment — no love should be built on the filters that filter out our realities, we carve out parts of ourselves when we do this, parts of ourselves that we can never get back. I refused.
While we’ve all been intimate with people, very rarely do we make such intimacy a point of focus, and the very first thing we see and experience in the morning every single day. I will carry those memories and impressions on my reality with me forever — and I know she will too.
© 2019; Joe Duncan. All Rights Reserved
