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  • My Kind of Beautiful
    Kaydi Chou
    14 Oct 2004

    I change because I can
    I'll shift through skins
    So many I've lost count
    I'll hang them up in my closet and order them by color
    And appearance
    One day I'm radiant queen with commanding gaze
    One day I'm civil rights activist with artful soul and arching body
    One day I'm just the girl next door with a cup of sugar that needs to be borrowed
    The face of a thief
    Goes next to the feet of a wanderer
    And I sigh because there are just too many outfits to sort
    Every day I wear something I've never worn before

    Does maturity mean isolation?

    These thoughts come through like clips from a movie
    So many parts of me I don't know which to pick
    I'm understanding but do I have to take sides?
    If I understand one side, is that one absolutely right?
    If I understand all sides, is there one that's absolutely right?

    How are we supposed to know?

    Did God know how Satan felt when He threw him down from Heaven?

    Does God know how people feel the few seconds before they die?

    They say God knows everything, but how do they know?

    Maybe God knows all sides and understands all sides and knows which one's right.

    400 mg of Ibuprofen relieves head pains, but does it make you unfeeling to everything else too?

    What do I know?

    I know I want to be honest and truthful and real. And that I want to be an English teacher. I know I want to be beautiful and artistic and calm and serene. I want to be the kind of beautiful found in the depths of the sea. I want to be the kind of beautiful found in sunken ships and broken wings and lakes at sunrise.

    What kind of beautiful am I? Is there an online quiz? What if the quiz is wrong?

    I want to be the healer kind of beautiful- the therapeutic beautiful they photograph and stick in hospitals to make dying people feel better when they're surrounded by plastic tubes and the smell of sterile.

    I want to be a breath of fresh air. I want to be the sun on a winter day. I want to be the sky on a day when the rain is hot and heat rises from the heaving ground in waves and the wind only comes when it feels like moving itself.

    Disappointment.

    I've got it in loads. Especially in myself. Look at the beauty of a period. It signifies ending and stop and take a deep breath. When people jump off cliffs, they must be flying on a period. I feel like a giant black dot at the end of a really short and boring sentence.

    Disappointment.

    When you think you're something and then you're not. Not to some people.

    Does maturity mean unfeeling? Disconnection? Aloof?

    Aloof sounds more like floating away on a cloud of nothing than just sitting there and watching the world pass you by.

    Who am I?

    I know I like heavy and sad music. I know I like music. But what makes me like music? Why do I feel that pull every time I hear a lilting note and a sad melody? What draws me to the dark, the depressed, and the pained?

    Is it a reflection of me or not me?

    One day I'll be old and 80 and falling apart. I'll have feeble limbs and no one will understand what I want to say. Everyone will pass me by, and I'll be a burden to everyone I know. Aloof. It must be depressing to be old. People who die young- they'll never feel that sort of pressure and passive pain. So does everyone mourn them because they won't? Because they died so young and will never see their children grow and leave them?

    Because they'll never have to say goodbye? Or do we mourn those who die young because we never got a chance to see them become old, to see us say good-bye, to see us leave them?

    Nature reflects life. A fruit starts out as a seed before blossoming into a flower. Then the flower falls away to something fat and plump and ripe to eat. Then the fruit, if uneaten, becomes old amd moldy and wrinkly. No one wants old fruit. Will people not want me once I become old and moldy and wrinkly?

    If we aren't consumed at our prime, we're destined to become mush and mold. But once consumed, there's not even the chance to become mush and mold. So which is worse? Not having the chance or having the chance and hating it?

    I want to be the beauty found in dancing alone. I don't want to be the beauty of a whole basket of fruit at prime.

    But I don't want to be the beauty of a whole basket of fruit past prime either. I don't want to be the beauty of a pile of rotting fruity flesh.

    I want to be the beauty of a girl with a broken smile. A half smle. A smile mustered because it has to be. I want to be the beauty of petals on soft and black earth.

    I want to be the beauty of a naked body standing on the shore of the sea. But I don't want to swim into the sea and swim forever. I don't want to sink and drown. I just want to stand in the open air and feel the salt on my skin. I want the wind to whip onto my lips and dry them out right before they split and bleed.

    The beauty of a breath of fresh air.

    The sea is salty. The ocean is salty. Because things there come to a . They come to an end.

    What determines the greatness of something? And why does greatness only apply to some and not to others? Or is everyone great in at least one aspect, and you just have to find that aspect?

    I want to be the beauty of floating white curtains. I want to be the beauty found when soaring above Ireland and all the land is green and the hills slope in arching grace.

    I've never been to Ireland.

    Disappointment.

    Found at the end of a long and beautiful sentence filled with the vivid verbs they tell us to use and the vivid nouns that we don't know we have. Is that how beauty ends? In disappointment? Because it's gone and was never given a chance to become old and stale?

    Does beauty age?

    Maybe I just ought to cut my losses and take the disappointment. After all, I still have time to become beautiful. I'm not beautiful yet, and writers don't get recognized until they're 45 and past being young and beautiful.

    Maybe beauty comes with old age. But we're so used to seeing new as beautiful, we don't recognize the beauty of an old woman with gnarled and work-worn hands. Maybe we don't see the sadness and optimism that there's supposed to be.

    I think I'm the beauty in old jeans and faded t-shirts. I think I'm the beauty of comfort and couches. I think I'm the beauty of old comforters and hot chocolate and holed socks and old songs that will always make you smile, no matter how old or how out of date or how much everyone hates them.

    Maybe I'm just a different kind of beautiful.

    Disappointment? Old friend. I'm the beauty found in comfortable emotions and emotions you've felt all your life but never took time to appreciate. I'm the usual of disappointment. A little sad, but the same beauty found in songs you can't forget and can't bring yourself to delete from the computer, no matter how guilty you feel for keeping them. I'm the beauty of the usual, the norm, the comfortable. I'm the beauty of a content routine, of a house gone old, of memories lost in a cardboard box and revealed thirty years later to two generations down.

    Some days I've got some of the majestic beauty I wish I was- some of the beauty of a ocean wave breaking, of tall trees swaying, of breezes carrying white curtains. But all days I've got the beauty of comfort. Of my old friend disappointment. And that's all okay. Because at least I know how I'm beautiful.

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