The Reconstruction of Beauty
This is written to remind.
Because some things are worth remembering.
And some things I’ll never forget.
Like her lips, soft as French Merlot after a hard day at the office, pink as a sun-baked horizon drunk off an afternoon rain. Or her eyes, green and round as grapes in the morning light. Or her arms, like a good nights sleep embracing my weary frame.
Some things I’ll never forget.
* * *
“That color of the sky,” she said, eyes staring upward, “is the color of true love.”
“I could live and die to that color and not mourn a day in between,” she gently whispered from the passenger seat beside me. And she asked, “Have you ever seen color like that?”
I looked up from the road in front of us and quietly agreed with her assessment. It was quite beautiful, and no, I had never seen a sky hold such color. And somewhere between lavender and teal, red and indigo, Los Angeles and San Francisco, I began to fall in love with her detailed understanding of her own lack of understanding, of wonder and fascination.
And it wasn’t so much the color of the sky that changed me forever, but her honest acceptance of mystery that so intrigued and caught me by surprise. Never before had I met someone with the audacity to revel and rest in the unknown, question everything, and hold on for dear life as she journeyed through desert and vineyard, cafe and savannah, canyon and ocean floor. All that summer the unknown grew upon us like ivy, and we could do nothing but try each day to enjoy the ride more than we did the day before.
* * *
On a quiet evening in the Appalachians, you can watch the breeze paint clouds upon the sky, push contrast against the contour of mountains and texture along the curve of the setting sun. On a good day in the mountains, everything is mysterious and wonderful and curious. And on any given night, you can hear everything important in the world and still be engulfed in silence. You can gaze into the faces of trillions of stars billions of light years away and still be pushed to your knees by the heaviness of the heavens.
“I think we’ve been invited to the greatest show on earth,” I whisper to her beneath the deep, purple sky of Appalachia, layer upon layer of stars accentuating the curve of her face resting on my shoulder. And she glances upward, folds my arm inside both of hers and quietly agrees.
And beauty takes on a whole new meaning when surrounded by great mystery.
* * *
And no matter how hard magazines, TV and the internet work to convince us that a beautiful woman is what they say she is, their attempts fail in comparison to the mystery of the sky and the women we actually love. And the blunt beauty streaming from the runway and advertising screens is flat and construed and unreal and tortured and twisted until it’s exactly what greedy media players want it to be. And they sell and sell and sell and push and push and push until we believe what they want us to believe and buy what they want us to buy and have sex like they want us to have sex and look like they want us to look. And then, a world once filled with genuine, robust beauty and genuinely mysterious women is suddenly filled with plastic, oil and look-a-like female drones attached to their Prada and phones because someone on some ad for some thing whispered, “This is what you need in order to be truly happy.” And it’s hard to find a woman without the glow of a screen reflecting from her face.
And a man never completely forgets his wedding day, what he once considered elegant and alluring, he just chooses to misplace the memory from time to time. And it’s just so easy to buy-in to what he’s told by talking heads and magazines and internet gurus, that women are beautiful if this and if that and if nothing else other than. And after a while he loses his young, cunning mind to apathy and lust and the pursuit of control, unwilling to observe who he has become or where the mysteriousness of life has gone. He chose consumption over creativity, porn over freedom, the web over reality. He traded thinking for entertainment, self-depreciation and envy for a pixelated world where love is but an image, a trendy to suit to wear then disregard. And it’s hard to find a man without the glow of a screen reflecting from his face. And surely, Thoreau, men really have become the tools of their tools.
* * *
“Where should we go today?” she whispered to me from her side of the bed, eyes closed, white sheet pulled up above her chin, face melting into the pillow beneath it.
And I could scarcely tell the difference between the softness of our sheets and the softness of her skin as my fingers traced the outline of her arm.
“I want to see the country and taste the wine of the land and feel the ocean breeze paint color on my cheeks and watch the green moss grow between my muddy toes,” she said through an irresistible smile and wrinkle of her nose.
I opened my eyes and agreed with her. “That’s exactly what we should do today,” I replied. “Right after coffee, of course.”
“Of course,” she answered. And she held me in her arms the way the ocean holds salt, the way the sky holds stars, the way coffee holds cream.
* * *
And she sat in the passenger seat beside me, quietly raving about the silty, turquoise hew of the valley below us, and I could see to the depths of her intrigue, a layered mystery as viewable yet unknowable as the stars above. And I was quite alright. And with every conversation, every mysterious blink of her deep, neon-green eyes, I swam further and further into the wonder of her self. And she was beautiful. And she still is.
