Beauty startles us, wakes us, ruffles us and leaves us hanging in a daze. My boyfriend and I are waiting for our food at a newly opened brunch restaurant, sitting in strange, braided plastic chairs that press little slash marks into our asses. A hostess sneaks behind the bar to reach and grab some rolls of napkins for a table. The muffled sunlight glinting off the silk of her moss green blouse made my eyes flicker to her. I saw up her tanned arm and up to her work flush and brown rimmed eyes. I am suddenly alert and shy, aware of the cold air on my arms, watching the movements of a beautiful woman.
Beauty does something to the observer. At the base of all forms of creating, the reactions of a receiver are of a similar kind. When I read someone’s writing that stuns me, I lay the book down on my lap and stare out the window for a long time, trees and their lines are sharper, and I notice the light of sun and the way it grazes and bends over things. A song that I return to pulls a blue sheet over my eyes as it begins and then lifts the hair on my arms, and I’m alive again and under a spell. I close my eyes to listen.
I couldn’t stop looking at her, the beautiful woman, and after the second time our eyes met, I shifted my body towards my boyfriend so I would have to strain to look over at her. Eyes pat around beauty like a moth bumbles around the lip of a candle flame.
Beauty enters a room and makes me wonder- how could something as complicated and porous as a face be made to look so easy?
Easy beauty, like the drop of a loose sleeve when a woman raises an arm to brush a stray hair from her eyes. The painters try to replicate the ease of beauty, which is dynamic as a walk, and as difficult to calculate. The photographers watch for it, and the promise of makeup tries to sell this kind of ease.
I imagine that morning, before the restaurant opened, she patted her face in cold water, and then rubbed brown charcoal on the edges of her round eyes- just a routine, not a frill or a pre-thought effort. She checks the time while she dabs pink into her cheeks and on her lower lip. She will be late, so she winds her sleep mussed-up hair into a clip. She’ll let her brown hair down after the first 11am rush dwindles. She does her job, lifts glasses onto a tray, and she thinks about the afternoon with her eyes out hovering the patio. Little gazes like mine trace her movements in wonder of that kind of easy beauty.
