Perfect Imperfect
A/N: For my friend @oneofthewednesdays <3 A very belated Happy 31st Birthday <3 She requested something magical realism so I took inspiration off 'The Hunter's Wife' by Anthony Doerr (my favourite slip-stream fiction author) but then this story got a life of its own and wrote itself :) Oh well, hope you like it anyway <3
Massive thank you to my dearest beta readers @peggy-sue-reads-a-book and @peakogreen who helped me craft this story and to @doodlewizardry who heard this story first.
As always, likes, comments and re-blogs are extremely appreciated and constructive criticism is warmly welcomed. Enjoy :)
Perfect Imperfect
Entropy – the lack of order or predictability, a gradual decline into disorder.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness. - John Keats, Endymion
Here’s the thing about human faces.
For all the words of the greatest poets, there is no uniqueness that draws people apart. Not when the face is like a lego house, built of the same tiny pieces as the postman, your best friend and Sue next door. Protein on protein, configurations of carbon and nitrogen and oxygen pulled together into the amalgamation of browns and reds and whites that form her likeness. There is nothing to it, loops and coils of DNA wrapped around histones in billions of cells that assemble to form the perfectly predictable, perfectly orderly shape of her face.
You’ve captured her likeness a million times and not once have you got it right.
The golden sandiness of her face, touched with the palest hint of mahogany coalescing into a drop of moisture at her cupid’s bow. The dark expanse of her hair that fades into the shadows of the canvas, matched by the slight frill of dark lashes that adorn her heavy lidded eyes. Burnt umber for brows, red crimson for lips but there is no colour for the depth of those irises that shine like forbidden lights across still expanses of water.
The smallest building block of her replicates in a fiftieth of a second but you can’t even replicate the shape of her shadow in fifty years. You stare at her for a moment longer, enchanted by even the imperfect reflection of her, before casting her aside like the other half-cast paintings of her. Unfinished.
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The first time you draw her, you sit in the back of year 11 Chemistry together. You reduce your sharpened pencils to stubs as you scrub at the faint outline of her chunky safety goggles until the nib at the end of your compass stabs the flesh of your palm and smears her cheek with crimson. Blinking tears, you press your blackened, raw hand to your blazer as your teacher sweeps past.
“Entropy is all about change. Allowing things to take shape and change form. There’s no limit to this measure of disorder; the only truth is that it increases over time.”
Perhaps, you muse, the bleached, colourless pencil wouldn’t do those cheekbones right. The period ends and you file out after the familiar figure of her lab coat but a part of you remains frozen in that moment. Stagnant as the rest of your world folds to chaos.
__
For a moment in the middle, you find yourself immersed in the disorder. It’s like that moment when the bus halts a second too fast and you’re still travelling forward in an echo of the previous motion, not quite falling but not quite upright either.
Inertia; a tendency to remain unchanged.
You are older, but not old. She kisses your mouth and you wrap your hands low around her hips as a blush blooms over the apples of her cheeks. Tiny blood vessels dilate up to meet the thin layer of her skin as the redness creeps down her jaw to the delicate swell of her neck and her hands travel into your hair. Like every other moment, the order in the world is slowly unravelling but for a moment it seems to stand-still.
She is beautiful, she is perfect but before you can imagine creating her likeness in paint again, she pulls you down beside her.
__
This is the last time you remember giving her your sketch.
She’s your wife, perfect head tucked on your shoulder. Your entwined legs dangle over the Harbour Bridge and her laugh catches upon the morning breeze. By all your geographical knowledge, you are sitting in the heart of Sydney but for a moment it feels like you are at the end of the world.
She has changed but the essence of her remains the same. How could it not, when the code that makes her is a perfect replica of that tiny cell that first created her? Her limbs lengthen, her waist narrows but it’s the elusive turn of her mouth and crease at her brow that defines her. You press her portrait into her hands and she’s left speechless until she realises the figure is still not right. The imperfect copy of a woman who smiles with a lip too red and eyes too brown could not even pass for the perfection that stands in front of you. She smiles, fingering the impasto fringe with love as she kisses your cheek, but you can only imagine those little proteins that make her, pulling piece after piece apart and together again in a perfect mirror image.
“It’s perfect.”
But later that night, you take the board out and begin again, once, twice, until those imperfect eyes stare back at you from every wall in the house.
__
You’ve got her this time.
It’s the perfect picture, the depth of her lips, the curve of her neck. Pale sunset-orange freckles along her nose, a slight dimple under the corner of her lip.
The real her, the template upon which you make your replicate strand, is half asleep and tangled in blankets and dawn. Elegant, refined, mysterious. In your world forever descending to disorder, forever accommodating growth and loss and change, she is your constant.
It’s a funny thing, entropy. The slow movement towards disorder; the way that the world is always inching away from perfection. Apart from the gentle puffs of her breath you could have mistaken her for a statue, silent and unmoving. But deep down, the pieces of her are always in movement, always shifting and rearranging, forming and re-sketching. The cells of her skin die and are replaced. Her hair creeps longer in increments so fine that you can’t even imagine it. She grows and ages, she smiles and blushes, the lines on her face pull her features close together into the brightest of laughs which fades into a ringing echo.
For so many years, your muse has eluded you. This is the last time you will draw her, this is the time when you finally get her likeness right.
But maybe, you muse as you touch her painted jawline, maybe this isn’t perfect. Maybe you’ll try sketching her face again tomorrow, just to make sure.