The water was clear, so I stared at it, looking at my reflection. I was ugly, there were no two ways about.
She had been right.
I kept staring at myself. The disfiguring scar curved an unappealing path through my cheek. My hair was matted with dirt and dust. I wasn't even handsome in a macho kind of way, like someone who had just emerged from a bout with a bear.
She had been right.
My eyes were red and puffy with tears. My lips were chapped and sore. When I ran my tongue over them, they felt sharp and cracked. Like they were merely pieced together from shards of last time. She had cut me open, and mocked me. All that was left to do was piece myself together after that.
She had been right.
I squatted down, and stared at myself. "I hate you," I whispered. "I hate you." I gobbed up a ball of saliva in my mouth, and spat. It created ripples in the perfect surface, distorting my image just enough that I could no longer recognize myself. Another disgusting habit she hated.
No wonder she had been right.
"You're ugly. And horrible. No one likes you," I told myself. A lone tear traced a path through the dirt on my face, drawing a line, a border which I had crossed: here is beauty, here is not. I had paraded myself about so proudly, so confident. My ego had been easy to deflate in the end.
She had been right.