Beautiful

I was 13 when I first understood I was beautiful. My mother tried to save me, my father never talked about it, her years of adoration with the face she gave to me. It was then my hair changed color, the orangey blonde it is now.

But Mom, you left out so much. You didn't tell me how it was going to hurt. Maybe it hurt you like this, too. Everywhere, Mom, they tell me I'm beautiful, how pretty my hair is, what wonderful eyes I have, my hips the perfect shape, my pallor glowing with each dignified step. Mom, everywhere they tell me I'm beautiful, right up until the end, when they break me in two, because I'm beautiful and can find another.

You taught me to be smart, to get a job and a life you never had. I remember you crying for this life, I remember how upset you had been in those days, washing away a spilled milk of a perfection that you didn't understand until it ensnared you. I bore your pain with every blow, do you remember these days? I loved you more than I ever will now, and to me, you were beautiful.

Mom, it isn't fair. I see the new girls, I see them all the time. And everyone will always say, I'm more beautiful than they. But what good ever came of it? They prance on, flaunting what I worked for. Because beautiful, smart girls only attain one type of man, and he is only one type of beautiful. My type of beautiful, made of glass easy to shatter on egos too strong.

All I ever wanted was to be loved. But love isn't true for all the beautiful girls. Love is money. Love is dinners. Love is events and cars driven by foreign men in suits. Love is nearly impossible for the beautiful girls.

When I was a baby, you assured me I'd marry a man with a good job; cursing my life down with your truth.

And wouldn't you say, I got just what I had wanted all along? You left me out again. But what could help it? You were just like me once. I know how blessed we are, what luck I have, but I also wonder, is there more than this? I never meant to come back to being a corporate plaything. I really thought my days as a living doll were over with. Oh, Mom, I wish I could go back...

He seems so happy now, the conversation blunt and pointless, meaningless and fake. Empty, just like me. You have no idea how it hurts me to know that beauty fades so... as I have in his mind. Gone, as if I never existed. Oh, Mom, I wish it weren't so.

And the girl he took for me, she wasn't like us. Everyone said, I was the prettier one. I know, I'd say. I know I'm beautiful. And they'd turn to the side, not knowing how sad it is for me to see. I always asked him not to tell me I'm beautiful.

Promise me, Mom, that I won't be this way forever. Tell me one day I'll reach it, one day will be different. One day I won't need to worry. That it is possible, to be loved for you and not for what you offer. I don't want this anymore than the men I've gone back to dating. But we don't know it any other way, we don't understand. This is all we ever get to give.

And smile at me Mom, as I pass with my McClaren, Tiffany Eternity band on my finger, to my apartment on Fifth Avenue bought by my husband, rich and ever unseen, like they always are.

Smile and tell me I'm more than beautiful. So much more.