Take An Ugly Holiday™

In anticipation of an Absconding Girl Summer

Vacations are a great way to get away from it all. I got away from it all. Or so I thought! But then I remembered something that probably a wizard or bridge troll said: Everywhere you go, there you are. Aside from being whimsically redundant, it presents a bit of a pickle when the thing you truly wish to abscond from is the inescapable vessel of your very own consciousness.

Having a body-ody-ody is very cool, don’t get me wrong. It’s the hottest place to be in right now. It’s all people talk about these days. But sometimes, being in a body is suspicious. Sometimes the hair thinks it’s arms and legs, or the insides bloat for so many reasons but also no detectable reason, and then it refuses to wear jeans — it will absolutely Hulk out of jeans if you put it in jeans — and your brain will be so annoyed at all the feelings you’re shoving inside of it that it will ball up the excess into the form of cystic pimples so they can pummel their way to the surface of your chinny-chin-chin.

So you take that body to a faraway place with no agendy but to ooh and ahh and lay, anticipating nothing but water-logged activities and SPF 50. I brought things, beauty things. But I was too preoccupied to use them. There was no time! I’d just swim them away anyway! I’d bask under the beautiful fiery, persimmon-colored sunsets on a beach where everyone would applaud when its final sliver dipped below the horizon every night — every night! The sunset was the big kick-off event of every evening. It was that kind of town.

This is the best iPhone rendering of what an applause-worthy sunset looks like.

No one here knows me or where I come from or why I’m there. No one knows what I do or if I even do anything. Nobody knows I’m hot, or I’m supposed to be hot. What a gift anonymity is. I can shuffle around in my body that doesn’t quite fit into last year’s summer’s clothes and point my plain face with its unwashed, salty hair around this beautiful seaside village and think naught of being perceived. Because I’m only here for mere days and then I’m gone. By scarcity values alone, that makes me already the hottest commodity (technically speaking) but shhh.

Puerto Escondido is such a gorgeous place that I won’t bother trying to upstage its beauty. I spent a week there leisurely lounging around its beaches, indulging in the cuisine, and exploring its natural wonders (lots of coconuts). Not that it’s a competition, of course. And not that I’d win, if it were. Or that it’s even possible to compare a human woman to a place. But you know.

Sometimes you go on vacation and unleash your vacation self — fancy, frivolous, open-toe shoes, body-con dresses, clothes with patterns that make no sense outside the context of a vacation, the glittery makeup, the fuck-it attitude. And that’s very fun for obvious reasons. Vacation alone is an occasion to celebrate.

And sometimes you take a cheeky little holiday alone, someplace far the fuck away from the muck you’ve been mired in non-stop for two years, and you realize how your eyes are so starved for new scenery and your lungs, new air. So you spend the whole time just soaking it all in, like one of those charcoal air or water purifiers that absorb like 1000x times its mass in stuff. You drink in every moment and you don’t think about all the things you’d think about normally, because nothing normal to you can reach you here. There’s no reason for you to be here other than to enjoy. And you know what’s not so enjoy? The constant hum of body neuroses, chugging away in the background, wondering if I look OK all the time. Why do I even care so much? Literally, no one is looking at me unless I allow them to because I am a shut-in. And maybe that’s partly the issue.

If you read this and things like this and find yourself nodding in agreement, may I suggest you also take an Ugly Holiday™. Free yourself from the endless burden of self-optimization. Whisk yourself away to someplace you’ve never been, where no one knows you’re hot, so they can’t say, “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be hotter? I could’ve sworn you were hotter,” and have the most relaxing time of your life, temporarily free from thinking about what you look like and why it even matters at all. Cleanse the hotness chakra (the one around the crotch region probably) of all its accumulated negativity and residual impulses towards achieving desirability, and simply be just another person in just another place, not doing anything too crazy. Simply vibing.

And if it amuses you to think about: in other multiverses, there are probably way hotter versions of you and way uglier versions as well. But maybe they don’t get to take vacations ;)