Pieces, pieces, pieces of me.

(putting the cute in subcutaneous since 1974)

I didn’t look in the mirror this morning.

Let me tell you, fair readers — a lack of vanity is not always rewarded.

I was late for work for the first time ever (really…the first time ever!), and blew into my office without a dab of makeup, and some pretty sketchy hair.

And when I say sketchy, I mean nightmarish. You know that awful, unsettled feeling you have when you wake up from a bad dream? Yeah.

That was my hair.

I have weird locks — they tend to be both flat and frizzy. If you try and add body to combat the flatness, the frizz feels free to explode my ‘do into something akin to a Brillo pad. But if you try and combat the frizz, well… I end up looking like I was cleaning the ducks from the Exxon Valdez spill with my ebony strands.

In short, it takes some effort to make me resemble something other than a Tim Burton movie.

Three different people today, including the driver of my commuter bus, mentioned that I looked a bit ‘off’. This probably had more to do with stress than my actual appearance, but I was firmly weirded out by a middle aged guy in a uniform (I think his name is Ted, although I think of all bus drivers as being named ‘Otto’ — a joke from French class in ninth grade) telling me that I looked a bit ‘hectic’.

I guess I could take it as a compliment… maybe I look unusually composed the rest of the time. I am a smiler, for sure, and a ‘please-and-thank-you’ kind of girl, so perhaps I wasn’t grinning today. Hard to say. But he looked concerned, as did the man who sat across from me.

And by concerned, I mean ‘totally disturbed’.

When I finally got to my desk, I took out my hand mirror to inspect the damage, and was somewhat horrified by what I witnessed in the tiny reflection.

Remember that sunburn from a few days back?

Today I was peeling.

And when I say peeling, I mean that I appeared to be the victim of a drive-by decoupaging. Entire chunks of my visage were flapping with gossamer glee in the blast of the air conditioning above, and I couldn’t help but let out a gasp of horror.

I think someone affirmed my horror from another desk nearby.

“Sunburn finally peeling?”

I didn’t even have words.

I ran to the restroom to remove the slipcover from my nose, and was met in there by a girl that I often see around my office. She looked a little startled by the sight of me, and I think perhaps she might have washed her hands a little more quickly at my approach.

I wish I’d thought to remember/ask for her name, but instead, I was ripping at the strips of skin hanging from my forehead. That’s not something, in case you didn’t know, that really draws people in. Rather, it makes them crave immediate distance from your scaly, hideous mug. She left without a word.

And I… well, I peeled on, eyes wide, jaw set. Once I’d gotten rid of most of the offendingly tenuous layer of epidermis, I headed back to my desk to grab my wallet.

I needed a coffee, stat.

At the coffee shop, the lovely counter girl took my order, and asked me to repeat the kind of muffin I wanted. I couldn’t actually remember what I’d asked for, so I scratched my head… you know, the “Hmmm” scratch. Except that part of my face came off when I did it.

All the businessmen in line behind me, who were waiting with barely disguised impatience for me to choose Cranberry Oat or Apple Cinnamon, cringed. The girl cringed. I cringed. I chose Cranberry Oat.

The rest of the day went okay from there. I didn’t touch my face at all anymore, unless I was looking in a mirror (which I examined myself in frequently — that is, as often as I could without looking nutso).

I managed to cease spontaneously exfoliating by around 2 pm. I also stopped doing spot checks. This was unwise.

I really thought I was completely home-free as far as embarrassment went (for today, at least), until I went to test out a new lipstick shade in the mirror at the MAC counter.

Ack.

My nose was bleeding, which it does very infrequently during high allergy season. My face was splotched with AB positive.

I wondered why none of the panhandlers had been approaching me today.

Suffice it to say, I went hunting wildly for tissues, and eventually (in the midst of my harried clean up) caught the eye of the same makeup guy who had talked me into green eyeshadow a few weeks previous. It was awkward. He stared, I bled. It appeared that he had no idea what to say, so I broke the silence (while wildly attacking my nose for the second time that day) and held up the lipstick:

“Do you have anything else in red?”

“Yes, ” he said, smirking. “Apparently, so do you.”