Yesterday I woke up. Brewed my coffee. Put my milk in my cereal and in my coffee cup while I smoked a cigarette so the cereal would get soft. Smoked my cigarette. Came in. Ate the cereal. Drank the coffee. Took a shit. I was reading the collected works of Ted Kaczynski, which are all true. He’s right about everything. I chewed nicotine gum. Finished my shit. Put some toothpaste on my toothbrush and looked in the mirror to brush my teeth and my eyeball had exploded.
It’s a blue iris floating in a bag of blood. Mayo Clinic web site say it will go away in two weeks. 7-10 business days if you choose the free shipping, but–what if. What if it’s not a subconjunctival hematoma as I googled but instead–I mean you can see the shape of the vein. It’s a varicose vein in my eye. Can they cut it out with a laser. Is it one of those eye surgeries you need to do while fully conscious. Jesus Christ. I mean–I have pretty eyes. And If I don’t, I’m fucking not attractive. So–what if a) it’s naturally permanent b) there’s no surgery that can cure it c) a hornet crawls up my dick and stings my urethra repeatedly d) I awaken tied down by elves who are hammering drywall screws into my nut sack like The Serpent and the Rainbow. It’s not implausible that it’s permanent. Because I already have another snaking Elizabeth Holmes vein in my eye, the same eye. So what if it’s another one of those, except this one’s right next to the iris and happens to look like a gigantic Rorschach blotch in bright, bright barber pole red from a distance. Because it’s so fucking gigantically huge–take one of Elizabeth Holmes’ eye veins and coil it back on itself until it’s like a full placemat maze for children from the back of a Denny’s activity menu or something. I look like that mug shot of the white supremacist with face tattoos who killed a cop and finally got captured and his eyes are piercing blue because the eyeball meat is all bright red. The cops all took a turn slamming the baton butt straight into his orbital sockets screaming STOP RESISTING. I look exactly like that. Do those guys get pussy.
Fuck man. What if I’m ugly now. Not fake ugly like I’ve been convincing myself for 25 years. Real ugly. Best feature now gone. Something brutally wrong now with two key parts of my face. Something that connotes disease, immune system weakness, haram, undesirable genes–what if I have to have an ugly wife now. I should be so lucky.
For Christ’s sake. It’s cancer. It’s metastasized to my dick which will fall off. Now I’ve got money though so I can force some poor woman to tolerate me. Get a sugar baby and playact like we’re in a relationship and then she goes away. Fucks some methhead with Garage Band, like they all do.
delicioustacos 
Ouch. One of my eyeballs ripped right off my face. Now i listen to ‘aargh’ all day long. Airborne pathogen the cause.
I don’t know when it happened or why but one day last week I noticed two tiny bumps just under my right eye. Kind of like a pimple, kind of like a rash, maybe something in between. It didn’t itch or hurt.
For the next two or three mornings I checked the spot in the mirror. No changes. Then it became a little less red. Once I saw the decreased redness I felt better and thought I’d stop looking at it.
I often go for days at a time without looking closely at myself. Partially out of laziness, leaving in a rush for wherever I’m supposed to be, and partially out of neurotic fear of noticing some subtle, creeping flaw on my face.
This morning I looked again and the spot is still there, two tiny bumps, no longer reddish or inflamed. But still there.
Your body is constantly showing you signs with varying degrees of meaning. Sometimes you know what it’s trying to say. Often you can only guess. Sometimes your body tells you in plain visual language about a flesh eating disease. Other times you body produces spots, marks, bumps and lesions for seemingly no reason.
You’re left to wonder. It’s just that isolated mind, sitting up there, surveying all that skin, feeling all those organs, calculating the odds that you have this illness or that condition. Reading articles on symptoms and treatments, looking at pictures of warts and wounds and vague discolorations. “Oh, mine doesn’t look like that.”
You read more and more about crippling diseases that show no symptoms whatsoever and you wonder about those too. You think you feel healthy but that feeling could also be a silent symptom of a viral plague feasting on your vitals. One night you go to sleep in the prime of your life, you enjoyed a record setting day of deadlifts and then you wake up the next morning and you see a skeleton in the mirror. Or you’re paralyzed from the eyeballs down. Now you communicate by raising and lowering your brows. Best case scenario: a genius builds a device that records subtle movements in your forehead and converts them into words.
—
I review my habits. My diet. Do I eat too much meat? Not enough meat? Testosterone too low? Is it environmental? Is pure sewage flowing through my faucet? My alkaline water filter is a crude instrument unable to stop microscopic hormone disrupters. The spots under my eye signal my coming gender dysphoria.
Will it get worse or better? Or maybe it’s the new normal for no real reason. For the rest of my life, which may turn out to be mercilessly long, I may have these tiny spots under my eye which are nearly undetectable to anyone not looking for them. But I’ll know without knowing why.
Some people try to cultivate an appreciation for the physical. For the beauty and greatness of the body. Muscle, strength and vitality. Sexual pleasure and the erotic. I get it, sometimes. But I also get why so many people have thought so much about transcending their bodies. I get why people hate their bodies.
I know why we write; because the page affords us an opportunity to achieve a lasting beauty forbidden to the changing, suffering body. No matter what happens to our faces, no matter how old and pockmarked and sallow, no matter if our appearance sucks the romance out of a room, we can project the best parts of ourselves, our spirits, onto the page and live forever in an ideal form.