Beauty is Terrifying by Alejandro Miranda

There’s something beautiful in stating the obvious

Something powerful about recognizing what everybody knows is already there

It’s like in the movies when they say “pinch me, I must be dreaming”

It’s like when a girl asks you what your favorite part of a woman’s body is and answering incorrectly and say, I like women as a concept, but I never understood how to put theory to practice and for a while…

She stays silent.

I thought I was stating the obvious

But stating the obvious is beautiful, and beauty is embarrassing and being embarrassed freezes people

Because you see beauty is different, beauty is out of the box, out of the ordinary, EXTRAordinary, unique in the way it afflicts each individual thing like your own personal scar and that’s… terrifying.

That’s scary.

It’s scary because I don’t like new things or trying new foods or meeting new people because what if I’m supposed to like it and I just don’t

What if I just don’t care because I how am I supposed to care about the surroundings when I find it hard to care about the system itself and for awhile…

She stays silent

I thought I was stating the obvious

I thought it was obvious that beauty was terrifying and that’s why I never approached you on the pier that night and I watched you wait for something that was already there for hours even though your parents said be home before dark

I thought it was obvious that I was unworthy to witness your beauty, so embarrassing to be caught even near it, because you are everything I wasn’t that night

I thought it was obvious why I never handed you the poems and letters myself, and why you had to read them second hand, itself a reason why you could never look at me as I looked at you

And as I watched you, scared shitless that you would see me for what I was, I realized something that was plain for all to see

I was a boy

A boy terrified of beauty because the ecstasy that comes along with it doesn’t mesh well with Zoloft

I was afraid you would see me stating the obvious

 But I’m not afraid anymore, and I realized that people like to see me do it some more

And I’ll give you one last piece of the obvious

I regret never telling you how I feel

I thought these things, these obvious things, that force that makes us insist on the fact that it exists and how it rams its existence head first into my face with enough force to give me a bloody nose

Like how when it’s hot everybody always tells you “It’s hot”

Yet these things apparent, these obvious facts of life only exist to remind you who you once were, a boy, a son, a caretaker and a dream maker, probably all at once

But these things change as we grow older and we have to grow up and we are all beautiful

Not because of the reasons those Dove commercials say or the fact that we’re all special but because even though there are 7 billion people on this earth

We are all obvious, and we demand to exist

Days and weeks are only separated by a fine line but those terrifying things that we all grow up with remind us to take it slower, or we might just miss what’s right in front of us