prompt: describe your character(s) appearance without using color

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M.C.

Her eyes bear the weight of the years, the life, the upheaval, she’s seen. Deep, dark, searching. Other times, empty. An abyss. A vast, relentless ocean. 

She smiles. Frequently. Glossy lips upturned at their corner. A dimple carved into her left cheek. Only the left. Though often, the expression, her smile, doesn’t meet her irises, the shade of which is indistinguishable, blending, bleeding into pupil. 

Eyebrows, arched, refined, rise along the expanse of her forehead, an inherent skepticism, a boredom, written into the features. She feels her emotions, the range of them she possesses, are often absent from her face. 

Despite this, she wears her ancestors’ skin, warm, sunkissed, marred, tired. Her ancestors’ displeasure, their joy, their strife, their triumphs, often more present than her own, bubbling just beneath the surface of her body. She can still feel their pain buried within her marrow. Their suffering embedded within her spirit.

Blooming Aztec marigolds tucked into ample tendrils, her disobedient curls extend down past shoulder blades and collarbone. When she had been a child, they’d reached her waist, wild, unkempt, though her mother, her father, the burden of being their child, their austerity and obsession with image, forced the messiness out of her. 

She has her grandmother’s nose, the smooth, delicate slope of it, it’s tapered end mirrored on the face of the woman she’s named after. Though she has a multitude of names, diverse, assorted identities and faces and likenesses she wields depending on circumstance, her birth name fits her best. Beloved, bitter sea. Enchanting, but frightening all the same. 

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J.I.

Her body is forceful and fragile; lithe, dynamic, graceful, yet broken still, a status somehow sustained from the years spent training and defying it, her body, its biological limits, performing flowing, ambitious movements delivered from the very tips of her toes. As a dancer, she’s gotten used to the ache, unsurprised by the presence of any dried blood. Pain yields to beauty. She knows pain intimately well. An old friend. Her closest. 

Where she comes from, the earth is covered in snow, dusty fields of it swallowing entire mountain ranges, villages, temples, like the pale breadth of her complexion, stretched across frequently bruised limbs. The splotches, unknown, irregular, indiscriminate, appear often, adorning her skin in archipelagos, each its own island. 

She is commanding and towering, especially when she moves, embodying the natural rhythm she has, innate. Everything flows in time with the beat. Her mother doesn’t know where it comes from; no one else in the family can move like that. Slender, willowy jasmine, sprawling, growing where and when she’s least expected to. She fits winter, and the chilly, shadowy season fits her. She isn’t sure she knows how to handle spring’s warmth. 

Cold, frigid, withdrawn, she melts in the presence of those closest to her, effervescent, spirited, when she can truly be herself. Often, she can’t, that side buried beneath the sleet of snow blizzarding around her, a perpetual storm. She’s worked hard, occupying a grueling, strenuous existence for a while - sometimes her face still wears the mark of years she doesn’t herself own.