Beauty...

This morning, I was going through the camera rolls on my phone, and I found the first photos I ever sent you of my whole body, not just my face. You’d asked me, early on, if you could see me. I agreed, of course, but I was so scared taking them, then sending them. I was already very much falling for you, and so much past experience has taught me that seeing all of me changes things. It doesn’t always end them, but it always changes. And it did, but not in a way that I expected.

You told me I was beautiful. Do you know that you’re the first person who’s ever said that to me? I’ve been called a lot of things, but never beautiful. And to see the look in your eyes when you do, the truth of it in the tears that shimmer there when you look at me sometimes, I can’t argue. There is no room for doubt or even deflection with a joke or self-deprecation. You say it to me as though it’s the truest thing in the world and, I suppose, in your heart, it is. I don’t see what you see, but I believe that you see it with every fiber of my being and, even as I write this now, in tears myself with the way it makes me feel still, all these months later, when you tell me I’m handsome, cute, adorable, beautiful, I am grateful for it. 

For a girl who’s always been pretty, I hope that the way I see you, deeper than the stunning aesthetics of your appearance, does the same. I hope that I make you feel the way you make me feel, that there is such beauty in you, in all that you are, that I can see so clearly that I can’t understand how anyone in the world could look at you and not see it shining in you. Your smile could, and has, carried me through the darkest of my days, not because it’s so lovely, though it is, but because it is so filled with love and the careful tenderness of the truly kind. That you share that light with me, that you tell me that my own beauty is part of what makes it so much brighter, just as it does me, astounds me. I am such an incredibly lucky man, my sweet girl, and I will love you for all of my days, for that, among so many other things.