Once, a close friend and lover returned from a trip where he spent a week sitting in hot tubs and skinny dipping with a former lover.  She was a model.  He came back with stories about their time together that involved sports cars and handcuffs.  Sitting in the car, listening to his stories in the parking lot of a nature preserve, I remember how he glanced at my face.  Though he loved me dearly, he looked disappointed and averted his gaze.

“I must appear so ugly by comparison,” I thought.  As time passed, he lost the desire to kiss me, and if he saw me remove clothing, he would look away.

I wanted to hide.  I wished that I could offer him some glowing visage, beautiful, inspiring, pleasing to the eye, but I have freckles and fine lines, an unattractive nose, incessant blemishes, stains on my teeth, chapped lips, and a generally unappealing profile.

The memories came back today on my way to the grocery store.  Many months have passed since I saw him.  A part of me simply does not want to subject him to my face again, but I am nearing my last days in this town, and I want to say good-bye.

The last few times I saw him, back in December, I was suffering so severely, I had picked at my face until it was bleeding all over.  I felt just like a bird who had plucked out all of her feathers from the stress of caged isolation.  When he saw my face, I had little to offer him.

Before he returned from a pilgramage in India in January, I searched for cosmetics that would make me glow.  I wanted him to see me and feel comforted and know that I was doing well.  I saw him briefly, but I also saw the face of his new partner on her Facebook page, open on his computer.  She looked youthful.  I drove home in such grief, I could not imagine ever seeing him again.

I pulled into a parking spot in the grocery store and looked in my visor mirror.  I examined all the mistakes in my face, features powerless to fill a man with tenderness.  “Oh God,” I said, “I wish that my face was more beautiful.”  Can the universe change me?

In the store, I pushed my shopping cart past the bread and cereal to the milk for my children.  Not ten minutes after my prayer in the car, an unusual woman passed directly in front of me.  Her face was half gone, as if part of it had melted off.  She had the most horrifically deformed face I have ever seen.  Most of her mouth was missing, one of her eyes was partially covered with skin, and the left side of her face was lower than the right by more than an inch.

In that moment, I felt the enormous beauty of my face, and I knew my prayer had been answered.  Silently, I gave thanks to the woman.  When I returned to my car, I looked in the mirror, and I was stunned.  I looked different.  I saw myself in a way I had not seen myself before.  My face was perfect.

I gave to the woman the wish I had made for myself.  May she emanate beauty to all those who gaze upon her.  May she be free of suffering.  May she know only happiness.