A Terrible Beauty.

Somewhere on the roof, there is a leak. Even underneath the music that plays on my speakers, I can hear it so clearly; the more I increase the volume on the soulful lamentation of Iqbal Bano, the louder I can hear the *drip, drip, drip* coming from the walls. There's a pea at the bottom of this stack of melodic emotions and for at least this moment, I might be a princess. I tap my index finger to the beat of the drip, while I mutter the words to the song that plays. Rhythm eludes me. I am not singing my words, I am uttering them to the staccato beat of water going to waste. Even my utterances are unclear, it's hard to speak clearly, when half your mouth is swollen. I imagine I look quite beautiful like this, I certainly feel more beautiful than I am, because the image of me from last night is still what I see.

My idea of beauty is too specific to be innocent and it's based on my mother. Many years ago, I returned home for the day to find my mother seated at the dining table. Her hair, usually meticulously brushed and straight as needles, were wildly draped over her shoulders. Her eyes were watery and the eye-liner she reluctantly applies was running. The left side of her face was swollen and a layer of blood had dried on her lip. People often called my mother beautiful, but that was the first time I really saw it. I knew what had happened, of course, and you may think that the sight of obvious violence would immediately spur me into panic and action, but it had become so frequent that we were numb to it. Too tired to hide, too hopeless to fight. I filed that image of my mother in my brain, not knowing in that moment of despair that I would spend my entire life trying to look like that.

Beautiful.

I feel beautiful with my face half-swollen, the memories of my blood still pouring from my mouth, my hair still unkempt and hopelessly tangled, draped over my shoulders, my eyes still swollen and red, unwashed eye-make up still smudged on my eyelids. I haven't become my mother, this is very different from her life, especially since I chose this ideal of beauty as freely as one can choose anything, but you know what Mark Twain said, (while) history never repeats itself, it does often rhyme. Our lives are different, my mother and mine, but they would go well together in a song. Her circumstances and my choices combine well in verse, but underneath the pleasant meter of this poem, lies the *drip, drip, drip* of a terrible, unavoidable truth.

The heart of this beauty is love.

This is what it must feel like to be loved.

Encourage me all you like to see my desperate need for pain and violence as a channel for my sexuality, I encourage myself to do that as well, there are a million good reasons why the brutal cruelty of people may feel like pleasure, but there is no nice way to explain why the brutal cruelty of a man, feels like love. My mother called it love because she had no other choice, I call it that because I wanted no other choice, but both of us are in our own ways, delusional. In our destruction we are chimeric, like starving fools in the desert singing about hope with parched throats, moments before we perish. Yet there is, isn't there, something painfully endearing inside the naive hope of an unlikely innocent? Something wrenching yet sanguine, in my childlike attempts to pick up the pieces of my mother's life, like dismembered body-parts, and put them back together in a way that infuses beauty and meaning, however terrible and incomplete, into the resultant monster. We all feel the desire to fix the past, but that alone is not enough to keep trying, the wise usually stop, there is something that keeps us rooting for the fools though, as they ignore all evidence and reason, bury their head in the sand, and keep on believing.

I keep on believing in this ideal of beauty.

It does me no harm. Not really. As drawn as I am to the abyss, in my quest for destruction I can be alarmingly sagacious, I know to arm and disarm at the right moments, I know well enough, to keep waking up with a crooked smile on my face each morning. I know to live also outside of the quest for aesthetic pleasure. I know to build my home away from this shaky foundation. I know all these constructs I create, to fix damage that I refuse to admit, is a game I play with glass animals in my menagerie, and on most days it passes like a wistful note in the wind, underneath the rhythm of my heart,  unheard and unobserved, but today it insists on itself like a gentleman caller at the door.

Today, it screams.

As I run my fingers over the taut, swollen skin on my face, this feels like love. There could be no other way to feel this beautiful. As I nod my head to the music and the mess on my head beats against my shoulders, I am convinced that I have never been this beautiful. As I touch my massacred lip, I know that I will never know another way to feel this way, like a song with imperfect notes but sentiments so strong, you don't even notice she sings in a language you barely understand. Drenched in all this evidence of the violence with which he loves me, I feel like I was supposed to feel when they called me a bride.

But underneath all this beauty.

A terrible truth continues to sing.

*Drip, drip, drip.*

All unchanged, utterly unchanged, the terrible beauty that to my mother, was born.