There are certain advantages to waking up without a face. With no face, there is no foolishness, no squandered hopes or wasted dreams. No one pretends when half the side of their head has dissolved and fused in a slowly tightening tangle of scar tissue and creviced sinew. No one comes to you with pretty promises bargained against marginal self-deceptions when there are no more margins to your face. In sharp contrast, the hole in her head was a mirror now, reflecting the ugliness of those who beheld her now, past the initial moments when coy courtesy and embarrassed shock gave way to an honest and blunt dismissal. She had often fantasized about being invisible as a younger woman, unseen to leering eyes, to disgusted glares and diminishing sneers. Unavailable to an abusive husband, beating her senseless when she didn't have any more money for his alcohol or drugs. The bruises and defeated despair hidden from view in the morning as she raised her children from their beds. She had what she wanted after so long, she just never dreamt how she would have to earn this anonymity.
She knew her future long before she woke from the pain and medication. Somewhere amidst the fourth day she sat up ready to leave, ready to take what was left of her body and soul home to face a life in more forthright frames, more virtuous shadows. She would have no other man, but she would not have him, maybe worth the loss, preferring he take what he would finally and go. There are certain advantages to the death of your closest kept desires. No more negative pain filling unfulfilled spaces, no angst over frustrated ambition or quietly clutched fantasy of eventual karma or redemption. Nothing but God's grace inscrutable and finally, mercifully unavailable to her mortal schemes and dismantled dreams. Dismantled like her face, no longer capable of holding a smile or a sigh, no pathway for tears, no public portent for fears.
She went home bandaged and ignorant of her prognosis, thankful for her children, and in a way, for her new found freedom from a long endured ardor for her own self-destruction - suicide would be a vapid and redundant exercise now. A search for purpose or peace had been replaced by a salient acquiescence to quiet survival. Her pained past had bled directly into an aimless future, and the flesh that had slid off of her face revealed the stark and stoic reality that lay beneath tissue and blood, beneath vainly draped exercises in modesty and deprecation. Oddly, she would live finally.
