I feel most beautiful when…

I am messy, uninhibited. When my cheeks are flushed with sweat or saltwater is tangled in my hair. Yet, I am messy often but do not feel beautiful often. My room is a mess, my thoughts are a mess, usually I am overall a disaster throwing on whatever will pass as presentable for that day.

I tend to focus on the little things, really small details that other people may not observe. I think that’s how I get people to like me. “How do you know so much about me?” It’s not very hard, people just rarely listen to one another.

One unfortunate thing about the details is I fixate, and it is usually on things I can’t control that much, unlike my room or my thoughts. I have currently been fixated on the frizz atop the part of my hair. There’s something about wearing business clothes, why does it promote the compulsion to slick everything back? Hair with gel, legs into tights, arms into jackets, face into a sweet but stricken smile.

So I guess it is hard to feel beautiful when I go sit in a box to stare at a screen each day. There is no mess to be made around the computer screen-only demands to standardize, to perfect, to slick the product into one that is shiny, and new, and desirable.

And I guess that’s how I try to be sometimes-shiny, new, desirable. I am 22, practically a baby, but my soul has always felt old. How am I supposed to pretend to not know the things I do?

The mess must be worn on the outside, and I know how beautiful that can be.