Downcasting

She had always been told her mouth was too much. Too wide, too present, too insistent on being noticed. So she did what anyone does with the thing they have been told is too much: she gave it room. She let it find its own scale. She stopped asking it to stay within the outline of a face that had been drawn, she now understood, not to contain her but to make her legible to people who needed her to be smaller than she was. * * * Without the face the mouth did not become monstrous. It became structural. It repeated itself at every scale until the image was nothing but the fact of opening — the simple, irreducible threshold between what is inside and what is outside, multiplied until the distinction between inside and outside was itself the only thing left. She had not lost her face. She had expelled the frame that had been making the face necessary.