The Beautiful Things
Beautiful
beau·ti·ful
adjective
It's never been hard for me to appreciate beautiful things. I love music and music is beautiful--beautiful music turns into movement and movement from music turns into dance. Dancing is beautiful--it is beautiful to watch and beautiful to do and it feels beautiful, too.
Beauty, to me, was the absence of ugliness. The absence of flaws, the impossible veneer of perfection. Beautiful things were strong, pure, immaculate. Something could not be beautiful unless it was extraordinary. I never consciously thought about it that way, but in retrospect I know it's true. I remember the feelings of disappointment when I looked in the studio mirrors and saw the one dancer that stuck out for all the wrong reasons. I remember the frustration that followed sitting at the piano for hours and never playing that one study exactly right. Even one missed note soured the entire piece for me. I remember writing reams and reams of stories or poems or disjointed thoughts that never made it past the unforgiving edge of my eraser or the harsh finality of the "backspace" or "delete" button. When something I wrote seemed beautiful to me, it was because I couldn't immediately find anything wrong with it, and for every one thing I kept I had days worth of others that I discarded.
There were a lot of things I never understood about beauty. I walked through art museums and the beautiful things were the paintings that looked like photographs. The beautiful people were the ones with picture-perfect smiles and pretty features and ideal proportions.
One day I think I started growing up. I started seeing the beauty in things that were a little bit broken and a little bit askew. I saw beauty in things despite their flaws. And this means that I finally started to find something beautiful in myself that made me so much happier to be who I was and now, who I am. There were still a lot of blanks in my definition of beauty, but I had no way of filling them on my own.
You are beautiful and you taught me a lot about beautiful things.
You made me realize how beautiful love feels--I was used to seeing what beautiful love looked like in films and photographs, but there's something beyond that and I didn't understand it until you held my hand and showed me exactly what it was. It still makes me wonder how I can be so lucky that someone so beautiful is in my life, showing me how beautiful life can be and how beautiful I can be.
I never thought of myself as anything but ordinary. Very, very ordinary. Almost painfully so. But you noticed me despite my mediocrity. You smiled at me and your smile is so beautiful--the flawless kind of beautiful that makes my heart race every time--and you could smile at anyone else and make them feel the same way but for some reason you chose someone as simple and ordinary and flawed as me.
But when I'm with you it doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter that I'm the type of person who cries even during Disney movies and it doesn't matter that I haven't got a firm enough grip on reality to keep me there all the time. It doesn't matter that I don't look like a supermodel and that I'm not the smartest cookie in the jar. It doesn't matter that I'm weak-willed when it comes to making other peoples' lives easier or that I constantly bite off more than I can chew. You don't care that I'm pretty much the textbook definition of emotional turbulence and you stand by me even on my worst days, when I'm a disaster all over the place and I don't even want to look at myself. And none of that matters to me, either, because if you love me despite all that, I figure I can love me, too.
And I love everything about you and everything you are. I love that you're terrible with goodbyes because I'm terrible with goodbyes, too, and it's easier for me to wipe away your tears and kiss all that sadness away because it means I don't have to think about how sad I am to see you go. I love that you can be incorrigibly stubborn sometimes because it makes up for every time I cave in and do something I really don't want to, especially when it's letting go of you first. I love that you understand exactly what I'm trying to say even though I make no sense, and I love that you are the best listener in the world. I love the way your eyes get squinty when you smile because you have the most beautiful smile ever. I love that you write for me even though you didn't think you could write, and I love that you hold my hand even when we're just walking along. You are totally and completely beautiful and you always will be, to me. <3
I love that my heart aches when you're not with me and I love that I'm happiest when you are.
Because that is my definition of beauty in its entirety.
beau·ti·ful
adjective
- having beauty; having qualities that give great pleasure or satisfaction to see, hear, think about, etc.; delighting the senses or mind
- excellent of its kind
- wonderful; very pleasing or satisfying
It's never been hard for me to appreciate beautiful things. I love music and music is beautiful--beautiful music turns into movement and movement from music turns into dance. Dancing is beautiful--it is beautiful to watch and beautiful to do and it feels beautiful, too.
Beauty, to me, was the absence of ugliness. The absence of flaws, the impossible veneer of perfection. Beautiful things were strong, pure, immaculate. Something could not be beautiful unless it was extraordinary. I never consciously thought about it that way, but in retrospect I know it's true. I remember the feelings of disappointment when I looked in the studio mirrors and saw the one dancer that stuck out for all the wrong reasons. I remember the frustration that followed sitting at the piano for hours and never playing that one study exactly right. Even one missed note soured the entire piece for me. I remember writing reams and reams of stories or poems or disjointed thoughts that never made it past the unforgiving edge of my eraser or the harsh finality of the "backspace" or "delete" button. When something I wrote seemed beautiful to me, it was because I couldn't immediately find anything wrong with it, and for every one thing I kept I had days worth of others that I discarded.
There were a lot of things I never understood about beauty. I walked through art museums and the beautiful things were the paintings that looked like photographs. The beautiful people were the ones with picture-perfect smiles and pretty features and ideal proportions.
One day I think I started growing up. I started seeing the beauty in things that were a little bit broken and a little bit askew. I saw beauty in things despite their flaws. And this means that I finally started to find something beautiful in myself that made me so much happier to be who I was and now, who I am. There were still a lot of blanks in my definition of beauty, but I had no way of filling them on my own.
You are beautiful and you taught me a lot about beautiful things.
You made me realize how beautiful love feels--I was used to seeing what beautiful love looked like in films and photographs, but there's something beyond that and I didn't understand it until you held my hand and showed me exactly what it was. It still makes me wonder how I can be so lucky that someone so beautiful is in my life, showing me how beautiful life can be and how beautiful I can be.
I never thought of myself as anything but ordinary. Very, very ordinary. Almost painfully so. But you noticed me despite my mediocrity. You smiled at me and your smile is so beautiful--the flawless kind of beautiful that makes my heart race every time--and you could smile at anyone else and make them feel the same way but for some reason you chose someone as simple and ordinary and flawed as me.
But when I'm with you it doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter that I'm the type of person who cries even during Disney movies and it doesn't matter that I haven't got a firm enough grip on reality to keep me there all the time. It doesn't matter that I don't look like a supermodel and that I'm not the smartest cookie in the jar. It doesn't matter that I'm weak-willed when it comes to making other peoples' lives easier or that I constantly bite off more than I can chew. You don't care that I'm pretty much the textbook definition of emotional turbulence and you stand by me even on my worst days, when I'm a disaster all over the place and I don't even want to look at myself. And none of that matters to me, either, because if you love me despite all that, I figure I can love me, too.
And I love everything about you and everything you are. I love that you're terrible with goodbyes because I'm terrible with goodbyes, too, and it's easier for me to wipe away your tears and kiss all that sadness away because it means I don't have to think about how sad I am to see you go. I love that you can be incorrigibly stubborn sometimes because it makes up for every time I cave in and do something I really don't want to, especially when it's letting go of you first. I love that you understand exactly what I'm trying to say even though I make no sense, and I love that you are the best listener in the world. I love the way your eyes get squinty when you smile because you have the most beautiful smile ever. I love that you write for me even though you didn't think you could write, and I love that you hold my hand even when we're just walking along. You are totally and completely beautiful and you always will be, to me. <3
I love that my heart aches when you're not with me and I love that I'm happiest when you are.
Because that is my definition of beauty in its entirety.