Sometimes the happy face you wear slips but you catch it before it falls off. And for a moment you feel it in your hand: you run your fingertips across the sharpness of the ceramic. Then like a china doll you return to your preset position to please your owner, but the frequency of the falling increases with time. Failure after failure, you become more familiar with the feel of the mask’s edges than you do with your true face of flesh. In this way, then, your heart congeals from one of flesh into one of stone: hardened like ceramic, but brittle like cold, cold porcelain—so much easier to break.
“Better are the wrinkles of the ancient and content, than the smoothness of a slick and perverse smile.”
A contemporary log of fragmentary pleasures 