Sharda Gupta Poet Free verse

The Girl Who Changed Her Face

I was eleven
when someone said,
“You’d be prettier if your nose were straighter.”
And that day,
I became a construction site—
a body forever under renovation.

First went the mole above my lip,
then the shade of my skin—
not honey, not caramel—
but something called “#FFEDDB.”
I googled “aesthetic jawlines”
and practiced smiling like silence,
like pain tucked under high cheekbones.

I downloaded apps
that let me erase myself
pixel by pixel—
they never warned me
that every deletion was a funeral.

The girl I used to be
smelled of coconut oil and rebellion,
laughed too loudly,
had crooked teeth
but didn’t apologize for them.
Now she is buried
under contour lines and augmented lashes,
and no one visits her grave.
Not even me.

My mother wept once
when I sent her a filtered selfie.
“Whose face is this?” she whispered.
I did not have the courage
to answer:
It’s the face the world prefers.

Boys loved my avatar,
said I was “goddess-level pretty.”
I ghosted them
before they could meet my actual face—
a crime scene of pores and shame.

What’s the cost of beauty
when you no longer recognize
your own reflection?
When your mirror becomes
a foreign language
you forgot how to read?

I am tired.
Tired of being perfect in screenshots,
and invisible in real life.
Tired of deleting zits
when I should be deleting pain.

If I must be beautiful,
let me be beautiful in breaking.
Let my skin remember
how to feel without permission.
Let my face belong to me again—
even if it means
being ugly
to the world.

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