or: you think she's an angel, she thinks you're a lying pig
She says “but I’m not” and it’s not always affected. Sometimes, maybe all the time, she really means this “but I’m not”, and you can imagine her looking into the mirror, her mouth turned the wrong way around and thinking this, pre-empting you with that ready fabricated phrase – “but I’m not”.
Perhaps it is that we are to generous with such words – beautiful, lovely, gorgeous, amazing, breathless, sexy, etc, etc… We cannot be honest because humanity is generally a kind hearted species that abhors pain inflicted on others (this point will be contested, I know, but the statistics are favourable). These are words we have to say with desensitising regularity. Not to say them would be to inflict pain. No matter that beauty is a multifarious thing, that it could be present in the eye of one but not the other, even given the same object, we have to make people feel beautiful all the time. It should be law. Especially when it comes to people who are incapable of seeing themselves as beautiful at anytime, unlike most of us who can convince ourselves easily enough, even if it is only sporadically.
There are always people we do not love, who we do not find beautiful, and no, we will not be honest. How many times have you heard, “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t see/mean it”. How many times have you not believed it when it has been said to you? To do this – to tell someone they are beautiful even if you do not mean it is not a terrible thing. It is necessary. It is kindness. It is not even the patronising kind of kindness. What you may not find beautiful, some one, somewhere, always, is going to find it beautiful and then some. (Note: I am not one of those who can safely say that beauty is indefinitely absent from evil. Nor can I say that the perception of beauty is absent in the presence of evil. This qualifies my use of the word “always”)
So what happens when you mean it?
What happens when you love someone, and you want to erase all those other times you have said it. When all those other times have stained not only your memory, but the instance, the moment you want to be that person’s. A gift of the present, a present imbued with an honesty that comes without a less-than-honest past – an “I think your beautiful” that is the first time, the only time.
Unfortunately this is not possible. Erasure is impossible. You would not be a sympathetic, empathetic, human being if it were possible. If you had accomplished the inhuman, the mystic, and lived as a hermit for all your adolescence – if you had never told someone they are beautiful when, to you, they are not.
I want it to be possible. For the sake of the person I love. I want a word, a phrase that is not bracketed by reality or the past. I want a word that does not exist to describe how she looks to me when she is angry, when she is clever, when the lights dim but she can’t go to sleep, when she is making toast or slurping coffee, when she wears clothes inside out but can’t be bothered because to her the world is inside out anyway (she might as well fit in), when she does all those things that are inseparably her. Words that exist belong to others. Phrases that exist were written by the ancients and past down as heirlooms and trinkets. As fitting as they are they do not belong to her, and so, their brightness and sparkle diminishes the moment they pass past my lips.
What can I give her, what can I say that only comes to nest between us, no matter how far or for how long it wonders afar? The history of our species has already given us this answer, and as imperfect as it is, it is the only one that convinces anyone of anything. As they say (or maybe as the way I say – I’m not sure) – Words mean very little unless they’re spoken in death’s shadow.
The answer has always been - I give her/him my life.
It is imperfect as it can only become proof at its end, when loyalty and the blood have run their course. It will always be a life and gift that includes a trillion phrases and words that belong to others, but they become trillions of softly murmured or passionately shouted instances of giving, of saying that “you are beautiful”.
When time carries us over the final line in the sand, if we are still together, it carries us into the silence that says everything worth saying – I was with you to the end.
It is a foolish thing to hold on to the word beautiful until you feel like this – until it feels right and worth devoting a life to prove. But it is also foolish and harmful to withhold. I don’t advise that anyone keep words of this nature from people as a matter of principle, but I do advice that you say it as little as possible, to as few as possible. And when you say it and mean it, make sure it comes accompanied by its only proof – a lifetime of convincing them that you mean it, no matter how many times they say “but I’m not”.