Beauty

Her beauty ruined my sense of proportion.

Not in the dramatic way people talk about beauty—no spectacle, no demand—but in the quiet, destabilizing way that makes everything else feel miscalibrated afterward. Like the world had been slightly out of focus until she appeared, and then refused to sharpen again once she was gone.

It was her face that undid me. Soft, devastatingly beautiful, yes—but not weak. There was a steadiness to it, a calm that felt earned. Her eyes didn’t perform; they held. They stayed with you. They made you feel seen without interrogation, noticed without being evaluated. I could lose entire stretches of time just being caught there, forgetting what I was supposed to say, forgetting myself entirely. Across an ocean, I wore sunglasses while sitting across from her so she wouldn’t notice the time I spent just getting lost in her eyes. I used the excuse of eating a meal merely to sit across from her, but couldn’t focus on the food. The fish and chips wasn’t my main concern at that moment, it was only her. In fact, I wasn’t even hungry.

Her beauty didn’t arrive loudly. It settled. It lingered. It made no effort to justify itself.

There was something devastating about how natural it all was. Hair falling where it wanted. An expression that never felt rehearsed. A mouth that seemed to know things it wasn’t saying. She looked like someone who belonged to the world effortlessly, while I was still negotiating terms.

In a sea of people around us, I would have never known they were there. I was fixated on one person: her.

I remember thinking—more than once—that this is what people mean when they talk about rightness. Not perfection. Not fantasy. Just alignment. Like she existed at the correct frequency and everything else was slightly off-key.

What made it unbearable was how unselfaware she seemed. As if she had no idea what she was doing to me just by sitting there. As if she didn’t know that her presence rewired me, slowed my conversation, pulled my gravity inward. That kind of beauty doesn’t ask for devotion. It creates it.

I wanted her in the most dangerous way—quietly, completely, without strategy. I memorized her face the way people memorize prayers. I wanted to be close enough to her to notice the smallest changes in expression, to learn the difference between her almost-smiles and her real ones. I wanted time just to be around her.

I never told her this.

I never told her how her beauty followed me long after the moment ended. How memory keeps returning not to grand gestures, but to her face in ordinary light, to the way she existed without effort, to the feeling that something essentially beautiful had briefly stood in front of me and then moved on.

Some people are beautiful because they are seen.
Some are beautiful because they try.

She was beautiful because she didn’t have to be anything other than herself.

And that is the cruelest kind.

Because you don’t recover from beauty like that. You just learn to carry the memory of it—poorly, privately, desperately—knowing it was never meant to be held, only encountered.

So this goes here.
With the other things I wanted too much.
With the other truths I never spoke.

She was utterly beautiful.

The most beautiful woman I have ever known.