beauty and existence

this is a very personal piece that honestly airs me out. but authenticity is in my own nakedness…you get the reference if got through the home page

It has been a year. This year I am sitting in my apartment. Her beauty lies everywhere. In the loose sheet draping over my duvet because I couldn’t find the right shade of brown to match the rest of my bedding. There is beauty in the make up stains on the rims of my Ralph Lauren sweater. I even find my old heels beautiful. Especially my black leather heeled boots, the ones where the right heel is lacking an inch and the left is proud.

In pure irony, my right foot is currently bandaged and fractured because of a vintage oakwood mirror that was outside the NYU Italia Center on West 12th Street. My vintage white Repettos were filled with poorly manicured feet and scarring from long walks. It was Oakwood and heavy. I am a mortal girl. I carnivorously shredded an Amazon prime box and proceeded to wrap it around the rusted wire that hung loosely behind the mirror. I trekked. Those three steps of the NYU Italia Center are dangerous if no one has warned you of their becoming.

My ill polished toes and already creaky ankle snapped under the pressure of the mirror versus my frail body.

I am only one year sober, or in recovery, or cured. There isn’t a term for my current condition in life. My uber eats is here with a smoothie. They say bad habits die hard, but I would say they wither instead. In a sense and for melodrama, killing yourself or trying to in my case amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. It is a proclamation that the complexities of existence are too much to bear.

Desperation and discrepancy.

Let’s not go too far in analogies. Rather, let's return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that life, in its beauty and tragedy, is not worth the trouble. Living is far from easy. It’s the hardest thing one can do. We continue the decorum demanded by existence for a plentiful of reasons.

The first and primal ones being out of habit and conditioning. Dying voluntary reeks of recognition that the ridiculous nature of said habit, the absence of any profound explanation for choosing life, the insane character of that metronomic agitation and the uselessness for suffering is truly incomprehensible.

The ordinary man, however damning life can become at least, has the pleasure of absenteeism. To endure living as it comes, cycling through it externally like a dog—this is in regards to the general. Yet I believe that is how life should be lived. I plead to have the contentment, the satisfaction, of a pet. Consciousness is a curse. To think is to decay. If man knew how to meditate on the mystery of existence, feeling thousands of complexities that pervade the soul in every mundane action, They couldn’t live. They would commit suicide, like the ones who do so to avoid being guillotined the next day.

Possibility is endless, yet at the same time nothing is. All is confirmed but yet again, Nothing is. No matter where we go, there is nowhere better than the next. It's all the same nonetheless. Whether you accolade, have faith or lack it, life as it seems to be is all the same. Between tears, laughter and silence, everything cycles and becomes the same. There is an abundance of explanations for everything, and yet there is none—we still crave discovery.

In the sands of humanity there is nothing worth more than the next. Why grow old? Why cry? Why feel sadness and delight?

Though, beyond all this cultural Nihilism, I am utterly in love with life. I write to negotiate with it. To participate in it. To exist in it. I haven’t always lived in the present, but
when faced with death I was nothing less of a coward. Through self inflicted tournament and neglect I knew my day was to come. I knew it was coming quickly. Like the climate clock in Union Square, my time here was numbered and by each governing choice it was expedited.

but

Please, love your unhappiness and hate it all at the same time. Mix everything up, make a mess of it, rip emotions and restitch it all! Be a downpour in a storm, then transform into a peony floating down the flooded streets. Have courage when you don’t need to, coward when you must persevere.

Why always expect a definite stance, crisp ideas, and opulence?

The future is unknown to me and I no longer am the past. The reflection of my own history oppresses me at the chance of everything. I have hopes yet no nostalgia. To live as I have for the past decade, remembrance becomes a cruel principle. There is nothing from my past that I can recall in honor. There is no futile wish to repeat it. I don’t miss the feelings I felt back then, because I now choose to feel the present.

I see an unshakeable beauty in everything in the world. Beauty to me, used to be physical, now it's abstract. To live a life of beauty can stem from the simplest fragments.

I recall with immense clarity my Sunday commute to my new job. I took the J or M train from Flushing Ave to Delancey. I sat there, in vintage low waisted levis that hugged every detail of my silhouette, though I purchased them in a state of decay. I embellished my torso in beautiful fur due to the drop in temperature. My legs dangled in respect of each other.

I sat there. I was reading The Post Office Girl (I so adore Chistil, her nativity famishes me). After three no service
trains rustled my fresh blowout, an operating train finally came. When I crossed that mustard line I scavenged for an open seat.

I always sit on trains, I heard somewhere that a muse is defined in body language and movement, so I replicate. Rather than my end destination being Delancey, it was Hewes (due to unbearable construction). I grabbed my free commuter pass from the MTA staff(as if I ever pay for the bus).

I stepped on the sardine transportation—rage was injected into my arteries, slowly flooding my body until it dripped into my brain. No seats available. Behind me the fat man's pungent breath overshadowed my eau de parfum. In an internal temper tantrum of fury—my
eyes shifted like a camera's shutter. To my left a little Asian boy continued to press the “request stop button” delaying my commute. To my right the stench of dry breath and bottomless brunch was escaping the distance between the lesbian couples lips. I have never liked PDA, especially when I am not involved.

My eyes ventured up, in desperation to find beauty in this tragedy of transportation. I tried to recall the previous chapter of the book I was reading. I thought of my apartment, my dog, my boyfriend. Yet the maintained beauty of my life did not suffice.

I turned briskly away from myself and met the horizon of Manhattan's skyline. The wind was knocked out of me.

How could I be so self involved?

How could I neglect my own newfound philosophy?

When I locked eyes with Manhattan and its endlessness, my eyes started to burn feverishly. Beauty is everywhere. Even in an awful morning. Beauty isn’t capital, as it has been transmuted to be. Beauty is a primal need. When we
look for love, as much as people say they don’t look for beauty, we do. It is in human nature to do so. Those who ignore beauty are the most shallow of all. Appreciation of beauty is fundamental—but what it isn’t is unattainable. It can be as accessible as the way a certain leaf pirouettes to the ground. Or in the way you place your shoulders.

It’s in the cups we drink out of.

It’s in the way our fingers move across the keyboard with such finesse. Acknowledging beauty is a lifestyle. It can seem damned especially in our current atmosphere. But, I promise there is beauty there as well.

I have realized that true humanity can only come from the knowing of things that are only to be yielded through the sharing of the mundane. Insights that can only be glimpsed over the sharing of a meal—seeing the shape of a person by how their fingers grace the fork, how much
butter they put on their toast. Do you prepare your coffee in a french press? Perhaps an espresso machine? Please, pass me the sugar as you tell me about the dullness of your nine-to-five and the dictatorship of your French boss.

Let me uncover you by the study of these mundanalities–the effervescent beauty of the mundane–the overlooked.

If I am conceived of one principal it is this. One can be understood in those seemingly meek occurrences of life. One can be seen through, witnessed, in the bare bones of living and in the beauty of prosaic.

To see beauty, in its obliqueness is to understand each other. Oscar Wilde once said

“Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has the divine right of sovereignty.”

To this sentiment, beauty and one's grasp of it permits an air of unreachable intelligence. To consume beauty, to live in the perspective of beauty, and to be able to understand it outside of your own bias unlocks an utter refresh of the world. There is no need to be an aesthete(something I would like to consider myself) but in a world so manufactured,

seeing beauty is to live.