Beautiful

Beauty is across the room, her smiling face lit up by a million colors of sparkling light in the dark room. I see her cream colored dress twirl and dance to the miles-away bass that rises and falls like a sparrow on the wing. People walk between us, laughing, talking, and stumbling, interrupting my sight of her turned up lips and smiling teeth for eternal seconds. Yet on her brow I can see a daisy chain, supported by her fine blond hair, seemingly above her head. My heart beats erratically against the steady pounding of the bass in the speakers all around me as I see her from across the room. Of course, Beauty has her friends with her, each of them looking and laughing and drinking, initially oblivious to being watched in the brilliant colored lights of the club. They too are what they seem: Witty, Shy, Adventurous, but nothing like Beauty; she is separate. The encompassing word describes both her body and her soul.

She glances at me, her face relaxing as her gaze drifts from my purple rose boutonniere, to my face, where we immediately lock eyes. We become connected by something nearly impossible to break. I can feel her, even across the room. Then self-consciousness overcomes her, and she looks away, taking a drink and burying her face in her cup like an ostrich. A friend notices her avoiding the side of the room where I am seated, and a festival of glances and giggles and gossip erupts from their wide eyes and slurred tongues. My nineteen years of pent up confidence breaks free as my wings lift me across the room with starry eyes and a hummingbird’s racing heart.

She is my beauty--my bountiful lifelong allotment of friendship and smiles and love--all the happiness I could want and need since the club. Our friendship’s inside jokes fuel sporadic dancing and singing in the kitchen, where pots and pans are a marching-band through the apartment. Laughter brings shouts from the neighbors, yet we are deaf to the complaints when enjoying life together. Lying beside her on the yellow-rose-print couch, cheesy movies are the background for thrown popcorn and conversation. Conversation of the past, the present, and the yet to be are discussed on that couch with no real care or worry, only with hope for a better future.

On the wall-mounted television, Gosling and McAdams are reinvented in our mind’s eye to model us in HD, each actor bearing witness to our playful kissing and enthusiastic cuddling, not once moving beyond that. A soft shove off the couch cushion and a prolonged discussion on the meaning of life are equally permissible and likely, now and for any hoped-for future. Then the evening slowly changes as the hour draws further into the night. Conversations stagnate as eyes begin to sag, and heads nod off against each other. I place her hand softly against my flittering heart as her head rests against my shoulder, where we calmly fall asleep with no care in the world. Although snores are often the only applause the credits receive, our smiles and dreams are beautiful proof to the love held not for the future, but for the now, the here, and the beautiful her.

Beautiful breath by beautiful breath we lie beneath a red-rose painted headboard, only now having the ability to relax. I see Beauty’s flushed cheeks and smiling pink lips, partially covered by blond, wavy hair, partially covered by a cozy shadow that pleasantly envelops her closed eyes. The peace of her youth in her near-slumber state is reassuring to me; though closed, her eyelids move to tell me she is still awake, but comfortable and content.

Sitting up in bed, my own face reflects back at me from some dead relative’s old mercury mirror. Sinking in a harsh white moonlight puddle, my face is grey and flat: seemingly lifeless, seemingly old. Grey hairs replace a mop a moment ago a lamp had shown brown, while a moon-drowned muscular body appears flat and bloated in the palpably flowing light. Many moments pass before I look back to see the moon shifting to illuminate a large wet tear that had fallen from her two big and beautiful blue eyes. Those big wet eyes that told me she knows what I knew she knew, that I have known, and have known for months, and have been hiding, to no avail. Our conversation of secret secrets lasts three years, sitting there in the dark, with no contempt for half truths, but respect for held in hurt.

A reassuring smile finally recovers her composure, not before revealing her long-kept knowledge, as I wipe the wetness away from her cheek, then slowly drain the room of the flooding moon-lake by closing off the blinds. I slide back between the sheets and cradle her clasped hands against my chest, still feeling the fluttering bird, struggling to break free of its cage. Slowly, Beauty’s tears dry and eyes close as I lie awake through the night, cherishing her rhythmic breath and still-beating heart.

A hundred white roses fill the chapel as I stand at its head, looking out at a hundred friends and loved ones in the pews. Some smiling, some crying, all happy, they stand to invite Beauty down the aisle in her grand white gown, with voices singing like the seraphim:

“Above all else, guard your heart,

For everything you do flows from it!”

And there she is, standing before me clutching a white bouquet of daisies, and a halo of light shining through the window behind her, above her head. I remember all the reasons I love her in that moment, and with her veil uplifted, I feel my heart spring into life, releasing the bird that has been trapped in its cage for so long. My joy explodes as I stand there, unaware of the future kept hidden just through the doors of the large, stone gray church. We stand there, smiling at each other with eyes locked as they had been in the club seemingly seconds before, when we affirmed our love for each other:

“She is my Beauty ‘till death do us part.”

“He will be my Beauty ‘till death do us part.”

…

Beauty looks down to me as I travel up the aisle towards him, my chest beating steadily with anticipation and joy. My love for him grows more than I thought possible as I see his tuxedo through my veil. My chest steadily pulsing, I finally realize that this is the moment I have been waiting for since meeting him in the club, seemingly seconds ago. I am finally face to face with him, as he pulls the sheer fabric from my face, and I stare into his eyes. But his eyes are wrong--I know it instantly, yet cannot place the problem. I watch with hesitancy as wedding vows are said and repeated to each other and to the entire world, all while I am watching Beauty’s face slowly go paler, until it is time to join as man and wife:

“She will be my Beauty ‘till death do us part.”

“He is my Beauty ‘till death do us part.”

We lean in to kiss, lips touching lips. And when we separate, he collapses into my arms. I cannot scream, just gape as I bend down and place his crumpled body on the ground. I reach down and put my hand inside his tuxedo, now understanding the signs I had been missing, and place it against his chest. The bird is finally free.

I hold the black rose in my hand, absent-mindedly twisting it in my fingers as thorns drip black blood on my black dress. Everything around is black, I notice: the clothes that more people than came to the wedding are wearing, the tombstone that presses into the ground, the eyes that stare at the ugly black casket. Everything is black but the sky, which had neither the decency to pour out its heart and mourn at such an event, nor the irony to send blades of sunshine to strike the heavy hearted. Instead, a bleak grey penetrates the ugly earth and sucks its color out. It had been sunny at our wedding, I thought, though I didn’t know if that was for better or for worse. I knew as soon as he fell on the altar, Beauty was destined to die that day.

Plucking petals off the flower, I can hear the liturgy being read many miles away from where I am--I am hearing it from far too far away to be listening. Instead I look. I stare at the ugly carved tombstone of cold, dark rock that will soon be all that physically remains of Beauty, a basalt angel’s uncaring eyes gaze at me. I glaze over his ugly, shadowed, swooping name gouged deep in the unyielding surface. I choke when I see our wedding date upon that stone as his death, and at my ugly name beside his, reserved for when the arbitrary birds take me. I tear at the black flower with my fingers after seeing the hideous effigy of our roses representing true desire and friendship and romance and purity stuck in the cold, dead stone at the center of the monument, “With Love.” My memories of Beauty clash with overwhelming rage, as I crush the black rose in my hand, sending the bloody pulp down six feet to the bottom of the hole I stand beside. In agony I wonder at it all, and for the first time begin to cry.

The tears sting my eyes like the rose sliced my hand, keeping me from opening them. I stand in the perfect, swirling darkness, listening to the wailing of friends and the gnashing of my own teeth. After an eternity, relax my face and open my water filled eyes, and I look upon the blurred granite memory of my love with a new lens. The salty water clouds my vision as I stare through it to the words and dates and roses, and upon its stone face I see that what was made is, was, and forever shall be truly Beautiful.