art by saskia bunce-rath

From your words, undressed, you see a pattern of birthmarks that could be rhymes, a pattern of scars that could imply meaning. Is this beauty? Your naked body presses itself against the wind, that is so strong that the movements made from your limbs make sounds as they cut the breeze. Is this beauty, then? You have intent, you have what a poet calls the soul and you have what a poet would call the heart. Is any of this beauty?

What dresses the world when we see it covered by our own eyes? Will I ever get tired of the sea on my morning walks or the sky on a cloudy yellow day? Will I ever get tired of you? When you approach me, as an old meal I eat for the first time, will I be sick of you? Is there a place from where I can watch your world? Are you in every mirror, every reflection on a lake? Is the sunfall any lonelier than when you know the night will soon pass? And where are you now? In a different country? In a different state? In a different body? Who will you be?

What I want to say here is that we all can be a bit tender.

I have a theory of beauty. But I am afraid of getting sick of beauty sometimes. You see the black and white being colored slowly around you, but — and this will sound ridiculous — you fear if someday you’ll wish to see something simple and strange. Something new. Will you ever see roughness and violence as something beautiful, just as you see tenderness and innocence?

Patterns are cages, I believe. So I like to think that beauty is always something new. The sky is never beautiful the same way twice. It can have the same colors, it can have the same light…

Forget it.

Forget it. It’s useless. All I want to say is that… I think there are some traces of life in this world I would not get sick of. I am not ready for love again, I guess because there’s someone still on my mind.

How do you get used to beauty? I don’t know.

There is something missing in my theory of beauty. Can beauty be so still? So lonely? I don’t know.

But I learned that tenderness is immensily beautiful. We project tenderness in a big ball of fire when it falls across the horizon to disappear in the sea. We project tenderness in strong currents in the beach. Big animals with cute faces are tender for us. A woman with a nice smile is the most tender being of them all. I am glad I can let them engrave my eyes forever, even if I forget them. Even if I’ve seen them countless times.

I learned that they are all kind, even if they kill me. That is my theory of beauty.

about the text: I am thinking a lot about beauty these past days. I had a conversation about it with a friend of mine I’m reconnecting with. A conversation about beauty, but also about a topic I haven’t talked about for quite a while.

He asked if I’m “seeing the beauty in things”.

I said “Yes. When I was falling in love last year I was afraid I was only seeing the beauty in the world because of how her beauty seeped into it. That if she was gone then the world would stop being beautiful. But the eyes didn’t change. As long as I have eyes the world will still be very beautiful, regardless of what flower I stop to look at from time to time”.

He asked if I’m “over her”.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But I am better. I don’t know what getting over her would look like at this point. I don’t have any news of her for months, now. I get so worried. And then some things awaken the memory of her. When I’m taking a bus at 6:30 in the morning listening to folk music I remember doing so while talking to her last fall. If it seems like I talked about her out of nowhere just now, it is because I’m doing the same right now.”

He asked “are you still trying to rationalize everything that happened, trying to understand it all?”

I said “It was like that at the beginning. Now, not so much. I know it sounds completely exaggerated, but it’s the only feeling I’ve ever felt that is similar: what I feel now seems like a form of grief. You’re moving through life, but you keep finding yourself in places you never used to be alone in. But now you’re alone. It’s like missing an arm, but still feeling it there, sometimes. That ‘phantom pain’ thing. There’s not much to rationalize; it was an impossible situation and I took the first step to break the communication. But she was a kind person. She understood me, and I had the most fun trying to understand her. I miss that. Some days, it seems, are just harder than others.”