Imperfect

It was to happen today, her perfectly laid out plan – after waiting for so long, she would finally be able to place it into effect. Today was the awaited day, the anticipated day – it was the day that she would become beautiful, more beautiful than her colleagues, than her friends, than the photoshopped women who adorned the glossy covers of magazines, and it would take place on this very night.

Much to her surprise, she had not been pulled over for speeding on the way home from work – for she was almost dead certain that she had been going at least fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit.

Then again, she reminded herself, the office was not far from her apartment – and the neighborhood in which the apartment itself was located was not particularly known for being lively.

Her hands were shaking, trembling around the steering wheel as she pulled the car into its assigned parking space – and she could tell by this that the pent-up excitement, the sheer amount of anticipation that had managed to build up within her system all throughout the day was now taking its toll on her focus and coordination. Much to her dismay, these were two things that she would desperately need if the procedure were to go as planned.

It had taken her twenty seconds to manage to get a solid grip on the gear stick and to actually park the car – this alarmed her, for twenty entire seconds was much too long, it was a waste of her precious time.

Her handbag was left abandoned in the passenger seat of the car, as well as her cell phone, which had been resting in the leftmost cup holder – but it mattered not; these items were of the least importance as of now. Instead, she used both hands – for they were shaking too hard for her to do so with just one – to yank the key out of the ignition before all but kicking open the car door and sprinting into the building, leaving the door of the dented silver prius hanging half –open.

It had taken her mere seconds to sprint up the single staircase that led to the second floor, where her apartment was located, and she had ran to make up for the time that she had lost parking her car just minutes ago. However, actually unlocking the door took much longer – an entire three minutes.

By the time that she had managed to enter her apartment, she knew that already, she was short on time, precious time that was needed for the procedure – and now, as a result, fast action was needed.

She raced to the bathroom immediately and tore through the medicine cabinet, causing multiple bottles and capsules of various colors to rain down into the sink – yet this did not deter her, and she did not stop until she found what she was looking for.

Painkillers. Definitely a must.

The cap of the orange prescription bottle was twisted off, and one, then two, then three capsules were tipped into her palm before being transferred to her mouth and down her throat. She sighed in content – for the next events would go much more smoothly now.

Of that, she was certain.

Her shaking having all but stopped completely, she looked into the mirror – after all, it was important to take a moment, just as her boss had always told her and the rest of the secretaries, it was important to take a moment to stand back and observe the starting product – to observe what one was working with, just as she was doing so now. She looked over her own face as if she was attempting to photo – scan it with her own eyes – gliding over every inch, noting every feature, every flaw.

Pale, speckled, splotchy skin, wrinkles underneath the eyes – scarring on the forehead and the chin, as well as two moles on the left cheek –

Yes, she thought, she knew – there was certainly a long way to go.

Reaching towards the bathroom counter, her hand grazed the edge of the pristine white towel before hovering above it – or more specifically, hovering above the items that she had placed on it. They ranged from a pair of simple tweezers to the boning knife that she had taken from the kitchen – and every piece of her “equipment,” as she put it, had been properly cleaned and sterilized.

The first imperfections that were to disappear were the two moles on her left cheek – horrid markings on her flesh, she thought of them as, for they ruined the uniformity of her skin and made her appearance far too asymmetrical for it to ever be considered beautiful.

Looking over her array of tools once, she selected a box cutter, sliding the blade out and pinching the skin surrounding one of the moles before digging the corner of the blade into the flesh, twisting it several times until it was deep enough. She did not scream – rather, she welcomed the pain that it brought, for it signaled the deliverance of her beauty, the ridding of her wretched imperfections.

Her hand shook no longer, and there was no hesitation present within her mind as she carved out that perfect circle of flesh, letting it drop into the sink as it came detached from the rest of her face before immediately moving onto the next one and doing the same, embracing the acute, piercing pain of the blade as it forever removed her flaws. By the time she had removed the two dark patches of skin, so different from the majority of her face – her left cheek had become all but covered in the blood that now flowed from the two circular wounds. Yet, instead of reacting to this with urgency, she simply reached up and touched her fingertips to her face lightly, staining her skin, staining her nails.

Cuts would heal, however, with time, and without scarring if treated correctly – they were only ever temporary, and therefore, this did not worry her in the slightest, for she had more important things to worry about – such as the scars on her chin and forehead, as well as the discolored skin just below her eyes.

The box cutter blade would not serve for the removal of such large areas of skin, however – she would need a sharper tool. Her eyes now flew to the boning knife, where it gleamed at the very rightmost edge of the white kitchen towel.

She returned to her bottle of painkillers once again, forcing herself to swallow yet another four, and then another four – as she knew that the pain that would be brought by the blade of the boning knife would be significantly worse, and she simply could not afford to let that get to her, she could not afford to be convinced to hesitate, to give up the beauty, the perfection that she had forever yearned for simply because of her inability to bear pain.

She now raised the blade of the boning knife to her chin, her other hand pressing down on the flaking, pitted flesh around it in order to better guide the blade as she dug it harshly into the skin of her own face, every ounce of pain she felt only serving to remind her how much she deserved this pain – for she was imperfect, hideous, ugly, and refused to remain so for any longer, as the large burn scar on her chin was forever removed.

It was important, yes, to have control during this part – she had told herself so in preparation at least two dozen times during her drive back to the apartment, for she had only one shot -

The clatter of the knife falling back to the now – bloodstained counter yanked her out of a` trance that she did not know she had been in, and she looked down at the object in confusion.

It did not make sense – she had been holding the knife, she thought to herself, within her own grasp – and yet, it had fallen.

The answer came to her when she placed her hand on the counter, only to find that she did not feel the cool marble against her flesh or the wetness of the drops of blood against her fingertips – instead, she felt nothing. Her hand had become completely numb.

Numb – unable to feel.

As if it had spread from her hand to her head, much to her mortification, her vision began to blur – her eyes focusing in and out and in and out, much like the lens of a camera belonging to an amateur photographer, and she could not figure out how or why all of this was happening.

With her right hand almost unable to be controlled altogether, she retrieved the knife with her left in order to finish detaching the horrid, hideous burn scar that had marred her face since her teenage years, pressing it into her skin only to find that the object was awkward and unmanageable in her hand, and the instant that she had tried to continue where she had left off, the blade had almost slipped altogether from her hand, flying instead into the flesh of her lip and ripping it clean open.

She froze – this had not been in the plan. Her lips were perfect as they were, she had not planned to reshape them so, and especially not by such a drastic manner.

Too many painkillers.

Side effects include: dizziness, lightheadedness, drowsiness…

It was her fault, she realized, it was her fault for sliding fifteen of the pills down her throat, for numbing her own hand and clouding her brain, for letting so much of her blood escape from the incisions, and now she had made a mistake, an error. Yet, unlike most mistakes, she could not simply backspace it or erase it, as she could in her office work – for it would scar horribly.

She had ripped a massive, deep gash that was nearly volcanic in the way that it bled out directly through her lips, and she coughed, she choked on the thick, metallic liquid, weakly attempting to spit it out over the countertop.

This one error, this mistake, as she had feared, was the undoing of her plan – and it was infuriating, it was maddening, for she had blown it, she had wasted her one shot.

It was not a simple surface flesh wound, unlike the two on her left cheek – no, this was a disfigurement. Attempting to merely erase such an error would not achieve anything at all.

This left one option: deletion.

After all, if fixing such a flawed item was futile, she concluded, it was rather contradictory to let it continue to exist when the ultimate goal had been to achieve perfection.

Gripping the handle of the knife in her quickly – numbing left hand, she knew that she would have to act fast, else the energy would completely drain from her body without sparing her strength for the deletion, and therefore dooming her to a state of greater flaw. She leveled the knife with the side of her throat and exhaled once, letting the nervous tremors dissipate – now was not the time to be weak, for she was now to get rid of all of the flaws that had attached themselves to her body.

She was to get rid of every last one.

With a single push, she drove the boning knife fully through her throat, the only sounds to escape her lips being a single, soft gasp, followed by a gurgle as she choked on her own blood before she fell to her knees and then finally, onto her side, where she was never to move again.

She was no longer imperfect.