BY: Daisha McHatton
Sometimes I outweigh the depression of imperfections and ponder what I wasn’t given. An
average woman with average broad shoulders, normal brownish black eyes, and basic stubby
feet. A girl without a father figure, a hobby, and without the delusions of suppressing reality
defining her. A person. An individual surrounded in the crowd of masses in her tall wide nature
carrying her in the world’s gelid overbite of expectations, that helps suppress the need for
acceptance. The mental mold growing across her undeveloped brain with the fear of constant
rejection of approval.
Imperfections are the outline of her brownish body. Shaping her airtight lips of secrets. Hugging
her roundish body of guiltiness. Curling her hair with hatred. What wasn’t she given? She was
not given the peachy reddish fetching lips of black and white box tv singers or their hourglass
shapes of timeliness. No, she was not given the brains to become more than a breathing
individual. Only stuck between the lines of living and sleeping without prepossessing dreams or
fantasies. She was not given a near chance to succeed with constant failures and life altering
events haunting. Daunting under her stretched mask of mistaken flawlessness.
Yet sometimes I would look outside that dense skintight thirdly point of view of being the basic
brown broad shoulder stubby feet teenager I am. Sometimes I would look past my delusions of
escaping visions of being an individual and realize in my humanity I am only a person. A person
with imperfect cells pumping and thumping through the natural streams of my body and
dumping into the pools of springs of a pit. A pit inside my stomach. A pit of nervousness and
selfishness that gives me a desire of accomplishments. Accomplishments of lingering
imperfections.
Lauryn Hill once sang, “I know I’m imperfect and not without sin.”
Like sin… Imperfections are what created me. Through the ignorance and insecurity of a 21-year-
old woman and a man who lacked love. To those who I may never meet under flowered covered
tombstones and those who did not take the time to acknowledge me divided by race and state.
To the man that stepped up but left as quickly as he came.
My imperfections come from a decade grieving grandmother, a swan, who lost her soulmate
early on and the weak pity of a faraway familiar face through a rearview mirror. All lacked
much, never truly perfect yet imperfect we may be, but Imperfect we must be to be unique.
Sometimes I think of imperfections as stains on white sheets that won’t go away from a summer
night of heartlessness or maybe they are the daze of a sparkling night of longing.
Maybe it is like a smell lingering in the back of my mind reaching, reaching for completeness.
Imperfections are like the wildflowers of open grass mellows, the chain clicks of plastic bottom
swings, and the sound of wooden pellets under my feet. All imperfect in their own ways.
I am those wildflowers that fold over when the sun becomes too great in the peak of a cloudless
afternoon. I am those rusted chains from plastic bottom swings that click with each thrust. I am
those harsh wooden pellets that cut my feet. Yet… once those flowers peel over their seeds
blossom in opportunities against the looseness blue sky. Once those chains snap, or its seats
become too thin maybe it will be fixed into a new one day for another flight flinging soul and
those wooden pellets will grow into grassy patches of grass or tumble dooms of golden silky
sand. All these things are flawed, yet beautiful.
Just like me.
I am not as thin or curvy as 2D faces neither am I clever enough to patch ditches of puncture. I
might not be perfect with setbacks of exigent images of my future making me genuinely not the
person I want to be in this moment due to the imperfections I have not learned to accept, love…
or nurture, but I was given life. I was given a hard-working mother, a backbone, and a mind of
creativity. In my imperfect humanity I am only me in my stressful, complicated, teenage growing
uniqueness.
Is that not enough?