Sometimes we hate ourselves. It starts when we're young,

You're a loser, a gawky awkward kid, so the first clear thoughts you get in your head, most of the mornings in your young, insignificant life,  is that you hate yourself.

Wherever you go, there's the same ugly, plain, caveman, simian sorta face.  You stare back at you, from the train windows underground, set against black tunnels.  You're in every shop window you pass, when the sun burns down on your city-sheltered skin.

So you get older, and promise to be better.  You get fitter, buffer, toner.  You get prettied up and shapely if you're a girl.  You mar your body or paint it appropriately.  You don't let a goddamn hand touch your face, not even tender fingers on cheeks, if you were all craters and scars.  You cultivate a style; become an epitome of urban, center-of-the-universe perfection.

You are individual. You possess opinions.  You follow local & global politics.  You have an urge to change the world, but also to find personal happiness.  You make art, or songs, or something that strangers like, get pats on the back and celebratory drinks from your peers.

Without your mother making you, you wash and rinse your hair as frequently as you can without destroying it, and soak it with some sludge, scent evocative of something summer, and pure and clean, or of a sleepy, mildly exotic, distant land.
You kneel in the shower spray until the clock in your head tells you that it's already been five more minutes than the time you've allotted yourself to wallow in your exfoliated, dead skin cells and the draining fluid of the cold womb or grave of the bathtub.

Or maybe you're happy.

Maybe you play love songs, and the way the sun makes everything gleam, and gives a translucent clarity to, makes you secretly want to go weak, fall & lay down, or curl up with loveliness on the warm grass.

Maybe you harbor something that glows, but for now, you're under dark clouds, idling, until that August storm hits. And when it does, the sunset will burn itself into you.