Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

Love can be anything you choose to wrap around the word, as long as the two people involved agree upon the terms.

Nothing is ever as pure as it seems at first glance; there is always something more complicated to be found if you peel back the unmarred surface of pretty things.

Social media feeds the narcissistic monster that lives within us all, I would think to myself. It feeds it and grows it until the beast takes over and you are left outside the frame, just looking at images of this creature, like everyone else in your feed, wondering what it is that you birthed and why it’s living the life you wish you had.

It’s easiest to judge from a distance. That’s why the Internet has turned us all into armchair critics, experts at the cold dissection of gesture and syllable, sneering self-righteously from the safety of our screens. There, we can feel good about ourselves, validated that our flaws aren’t as bad as theirs, unchallenged in our superiority. Moral high ground is a pleasant place to perch, even if the view turns out to be rather limited in scope. But it’s much harder to judge when someone is in your face, human in their vulnerability.

But life and circumstance do their work on the biases that are already written into our genes.