Justin Moreau--D7 WIP

Imagine the most attractive man you can think of. Now it would be nice if you were already thinking of me, but even I’m not dumb enough to believe that. You should take that guy I told you to imagine and take away like all of his muscle mass. He didn’t really need it anyway because when you think about it, it’s not really that useful is it? I get by without it just fine. Now shrink him down to about five foot nine and take a good look of your dashing tall young man before shrinking him down another eight inches or so. But remember not to shrink the feet. Big feet are important for making your hunky friend trip every now and then over nothing because he kinda does that a lot. You don’t have to change much about your fellow’s hands as long as you weren’t picturing hands that would be able to catch you from a third story window or make a somewhat threatening fist. My hands are clean though and since I haven’t had to follow my dad into the woods to cut trees, they are scarless, which is a rare (but of course incredibly desirable) quality where I’m from. If you’ve followed my directions so far, you could probably draw my chalk outline on the street at my crime scene if I got murdered, so congratulations!

But your perfect man has a face for me to mar in your mind’s eye, so you can get ready for round two. Start off by just closing his mouth to hide his crooked and jagged teeth. You can leave his lips pretty thin and pale, but just add some chapped skin in the wintertime because District Seven can get pretty nippy. Spatter some freckles across your dream guy’s easily sunburnt face and add some bushy hair to his eyebrows. If you were picturing a man whose eyes lit up when he sees you, then you’re in luck. My dark blue eyes will. It’s more of the way a six year old’s eyes light up when he sees a cool toy than the way that your hansom fellow’s eyes sparkle in the moonlight, but it counts for something. You don’t have to do anything too dramatic with my nose. I don’t have a huge hooked monument on my face or a nose that is oddly squished and pudgy. It’s just your run of the mill button nose. Now that I match up much better to the guy you’ve been fantasizing about for the last couple of minutes, I will give you an opportunity to reconsider your decision not to go out with me.

I hate shopping for everything. I can’t stand buying anything. I never understood why some people find joy in the unnecessary stress of looking at an overwhelming number of t-shirts and selecting the one that you would wear the most. So my wardrobe is pretty much just a hodgepodge of things that have been given to me by my parents and others for the first day of school, my birthday, or because they pity me for wearing the same ratty old clothes over and over again. That suits me just fine because it saves me from the terrors of making my own difficult decisions, but it also means that it is kind of unusual that I wear a cohesive, matching outfit. I care just a much about my somewhat stringy brown mess of hair as I do about my clothes. I just let it do what it wants to keep from having to decide how I want it to look. When it gets to the point where it gets in my way, I tie it back until my parents cut it and then I just let it go free again.

: I guess you could say I don’t like myself very much. You’d be pretty much right. There’s not a lot to like about me. Like I’ve already told you, I’m not much to look at and my aversion of decision making is extremely aggravating and sometimes, even debilitating. Nothing is worse than having your waiter and everyone at your table wait for me as I take waaay too much time trying to figure out what I want to eat. I find myself agreeing to do things that I don’t want to do just to make it so I don’t have to pick what I do instead. I wish I could be attractive and decisive and strong, but I'm just little old Justin, bumbling through life wishing for someone else to make my decisions for me.

If you could quantify how much I dislike myself and multiply it by three, you would get about how much I like other people. No matter who I meet, they seem so great. I am almost eerily good at seeing the good in everyone and eerily bad at missing the hints of evil that seem to slap others in the face. I trust most people pretty wholeheartedly because for the most part, they come through for me better than I probably could come through for myself. It isn’t uncommon that I find myself worrying that certain people do not like me, so I will go out of my way to be nice to them and do what they want me to in an attempt to improve their perception of me.

Still a work in progress.