Letter 2: In Response to Your Selfish Request

Aselia Layla

Lebanon, PA

Dear Zayn,

I wondered when you’d write. I wondered if you’d merely tore up my images and forgot how to write. But it seems the pen has found a way back to your hand once more.

As for I, I also questioned and hesitated in responding. Shall I stand at the podium and persuade dozens of my beauty? Or merely you?

The scar above my left eyebrow was from my summers as a child in the Levant. Between a rock and a slippery slope, my skin found a new home. My nose is my grandfather’s. He left this world with nothing to his name; the only inheritance I received was his mountain of a nose. My shaded skin, often leather-like, shields me from the sun and my thick eyebrows catch my sweat.

There is no convincing necessary. Beauty is a mirage. The eye is the greatest illusionist and performs best on the heart.

This very heart, the one my leather skin protects, is too frail to meet and then ultimately find ourselves in the same position. With that, I must decline your request. I guess I will forever remain in your mind as an image, a moment in time held together through light on a sheet, but one unworthy of remembering.

Aselia Layla