About Beauty

How terrible is beauty.

So terrible because it asks us to look at what cannot be kept—something transient, wild, delicate, already on its way out of itself. It lifts us for a moment, loosens something inside us, draws out that involuntary release of breath, and then leaves us with the knowledge that whatever just touched us cannot remain where it was.

We sit with the afterimage of it, often alone, caught in the instant before understanding fully settles in—the instant before we know we cannot touch it, cannot keep it, cannot return to it intact. Beauty is unobtainable not because we fail to reach it, but because it does not consent to staying. Still, the wanting continues. We keep believing that if we search long enough, if we move toward it carefully enough, it will yield, it will finally do what we imagine it might do.

It never does. Even when we think we have captured it, time begins its quiet work, and what remains becomes something thinner, duller, less alive than what first undid our eyes and heart.