for Nike

"I am going to Paris where I will be beautiful"

She is more beautiful in this moment than I have ever seen her. It is nothing to do with her strong cheekbones, her large intelligent eyes that are dark and unwavering. It is about a kind of composure that she carries with her. A stillness that strikes me as more beautiful than any physical feature. I had never imagined that I could be beautiful anywhere. Even Paris. I have always seen myself as gnomic. I am not the heroine of the tale. I am the comic side-kick who finds a kind of resolution, left with the love of a dog, or alone. The one who leaves us with a sweet smile, but not the character that moves us. Now, seeing her so beautiful, I wonder if perhaps I have misjudged myself.

Beauty is all about symmetry, they say. Some perfect form of balance, or perhaps something that is almost perfectly balanced, the symmetry thrown into stark relief by the introduction of some small imperfection.

My eye seems to slide off the things that others may consider beautiful. Symmetry does not capture my attention. I am more drawn to the person who feels misplaced. I am attracted to the loners, the overlooked, the undervalued. I like the look of side streets, alleys variously decorated with bright paint sprayed indiscriminately. I like my houses tumble down and my bookshelves a patchwork of spines at a lean.

Perhaps it should be no surprise to me then that I woke up one morning, maybe a week or two ago and found that I was beautiful. Not pretty. Not like the girls who turn heads and who earn free cocktails just by gracing others with their symmetry. I woke and did not need to look in a mirror to know that somehow I had overlooked the obvious.

I am my own tumbledown building. I am the joyful expanse of my own flesh with the marks of age and a life of pleasure worn proudly like any graffiti-strewn alley. I like my own taste, admire it even. No one I know has the kind of perfect match in film and art and literature. I like who I am. I am strangely surprised by this. I like what my body does when I am touching it. I like the skill with which I bring myself to orgasm. I like the way I orgasm, contained and yet abandoned to the pleasure of it. I like that I can find pleasure in the slightest disturbance of the air.

I like myself. How could this be? I barely recognise my relationship to myself. Gone is the stress and worry, my constant assessing and reassessing of my own behaviour. I try on clothes and face a mirror fearlessly for perhaps the first time in my life. I am short and large and odd looking. My face is not pretty and my body is certainly not something to be reproduced endlessly like a photograph of a model or a parade of catwalk beauties each one similar to the next. I am myself and I am beautiful. In my own very particular way. This self-like makes me uneasy, but I am fine with that as well. It is the kind of uneasiness that I can love.

It has been almost a week since I became beautiful and I wonder how long this feeling will remain.