Every dermatologist’s office is trying to sell you Botox.

They promise you “healthy, glowing skin!”

and overpriced product packages.

The lady checks you in asking for your name and date of birth

in a voice so quiet you have to press your face to the glass.

Click space click click click

the computer makes that noise.

She tells me to take a seat.

I sit in a plastic chair.

I wonder if there’s a store that sells this same chair to all dermatologists.

I hope so.

Everyone around me is reading the paper and 70 years my senior.

Is good skin only for the dying?

There is a television in front of me

flashing ads for what you should do and buy

and warnings about sun and cancer and smoking

and the models are so attractive

and I sink in my seat a bit.

Maybe if I lived in this waiting room I’d have no scars

and my skin would glow so brilliantly

that people would be afraid to look at me.

I’m taken to a closet sized office where I’ve been waiting for 10 minutes now.

It’s always like that.

Maybe the suspense makes you think you’re getting what you’re paying for.

Looming to my right are four cursive certificates in gold frames

assuring me that I made the right choice in being here.

They are stacked one on top of another

all the frames are slightly different.

They all look like my high school diploma.

Maybe Dr. Rockoff will come in soon to do whatever he’s supposed to.

Maybe he won’t.

Maybe I’ll try to open the door and it’ll be locked and I’ll have to live in this skincare prison cell

surviving off Premium Hand Sanitizer with Aloe and Bacteriostatic .9% Sodium Chloride

as my skin grows indefinitely worse and I die under fluorescent lights.

I can hear him talking to a patient in the other room.

She has really stubborn acne and pimples on her ass.