They are so flat that they cover the world, spread out to color and shape the things you could never be. You must be like them to matter. You are not like them. You are not enough. You can’t taste what they taste, their tongues are slick, reflective, polished smooth and receptive only to the finest particulates, the most rarified, the most refined. Flawless bodies an order more evolved than yours. Your depth is an illusion, a false consolation you created to keep envy from splitting you in two. You don’t hate them for being stupid, or fake, or airbrushed and reconstructed. You don’t hate the impossible standards they set, the wreckage your attempts to match those standards make of your mind and your life. You don’t hate them for having what you never wanted before you saw them but now anxiously, abjectly, need.

You can’t ever hate them because deep inside, in a place you admit to no one, you believe that one day we will all realize how special you are and you will become one of them.
I paint that place. I should be ashamed of myself.