Certain Type of Beauty
There’s a certain type of guilt in secretly using a friend’s toothpaste. There I stood at her sink, aimlessly rinsing the white bristles of my toothbrush in cold water before lining them with a slab of paste following a quick squeeze of the tube. I hoped she wouldn’t notice the difference in weight or measure how far away the tube was from the edge of the sink or confront me about my germ-infested toothbrush bristles coming in contact with the mouth of her tube of toothpaste. I tried to put it back where I found it, back where she wouldn’t notice that it was I who would share the same minty breath after it was her turn to scrub her enamel.
I believe in a God who has all the statistics. A God who marks down on a plastic clipboard how many times I’ve listened to a certain song. A God who keeps track of the number of stutter steps I’ve taken in my lifetime. A God who could instantly tell me how many times I nodded my head, pretending to understand something that I didn’t understand at all. A God who would be able to tell me exactly how long I was in that bathroom, brushing my teeth with toothpaste that didn’t belong to me.
Perhaps I’ll buy her a new tube. And I’ll buy this tube at a grocery store where I’ll discover that there’s a certain type of frustration in forgetting someone’s name. There I’ll stand with my back turned to him, in the fruit aisle, when he’ll tap me on the shoulder and wave a hearty hello. We’ll carry on a conversation about life and school and work and the God who is counting how many times my brain has refreshed the page on which I store my memory of names and faces. I imagine him asking me if hummingbirds slurp or if I enjoy the sound of ice hitting the bottom of a frosty glass. I’ll answer that I never really thought about that . . . I’ve only thought about how often I’ve paid close attention to my mom tying her shoelaces in the foyer attached to our living room.
And it was in that living room where I showed my parents that there’s a certain type of preciousness in seeing their first names written by a kindergartener. When I was five-years-old, I liked to practice writing names, and if my handwriting back then could be described using only a body image, it would be tall and lanky. But that didn’t stop my parents from keeping everything: the imprint of my left hand dipped in red finger paint and then pressed onto a pink piece of construction paper; the shadow of my 5-year-old face as drawn by a teacher’s aide; the holiday cards and macaroni necklaces I always loved to create. But what I loved most was spelling words such as fruit, ice, glass . . . words that came easily to me before they could be used in sentences by a man whose never-ending conversation would prevent me from moving to the snack aisle full of potato chips and spicy dip.
It didn’t occur to me that there’s a certain type of loveliness in hearing a bag of potato chips exhale until one day last week when I accidentally heard that briefly released patch of breath. Next time you open a bag of potato chips or a can of soda . . . listen. You don’t even have to hold your ear up to the thing. Just listen closely.
One day I watched the love of my lifetime nail a picture frame to a wall. I stood beside him and tilted my head to the side, as if I were standing in a crowded art gallery, shoulder to shoulder, with people who knew very little about brushstrokes and colors, yet gladly paid admission fees. I loved watching him hang the frame, step back, judge its alignment, step forward, fix the crookedness, step back, cross his arms, then beckon me to look at it with a straight face that matched his. For the next half hour, I spent my time wondering how long that photograph would hang in that certain spot. Years? Months? It lasted only a few minutes. He decided it didn’t belong on that wall after all.
I love framed photographs that showcase smiles because there’s a certain type of challenge in trying to count the number of teeth in a person’s mouth. Each edge of a tooth? A tick mark. It’s difficult to calculate, but can probably be done. I wouldn’t know this, because it’s another one of those things I just write about and remind myself to do after I close my Microsoft Word document and call my friend, asking her to recite the alphabet backwards just to prove she’s not inebriated. She did this at the bar on her 21st birthday, and I spent the rest of the night wondering how long it took her to learn it, and how it feels to be correct in putting i before e quite literally.
Yes, there’s a certain type of beauty in the alphabet, and the God who engraves all the world’s alphabets on a clipboard, and acquaintances walking around in a grocery store, and the talents of a young child, and substituting a food product for a seashell, and accidentally bending a nail, and a friend wrapping her hair in a towel after a hot shower before opening a brand new tube of toothpaste.
This year, I want to be the first person to wish her a happy birthday.
Kayla Pongrac is an avid writer, reader, tea drinker, and vinyl record spinner. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in theNewerYork, Split Lip Magazine, Oblong, The Bohemyth, HOOT, DUM DUM Zine, and Mixtape Methodology, among others. When she’s not writing creatively, she’s writing professionally for two newspapers and a few magazines in her hometown of Johnstown, PA. To read more of Kayla’s work, visit www.kaylapongrac.com or follow her on Twitter @KP_the_Promisee.
