International Lifestyle Magazine Issue 51 | Page 120

beautiful
Words: Eileen Bennett

You used to be beautiful. You used to have strawberry-blonde
curls framing your chubby face. You used to have peaches
and cream pink skin and eyes that were so blue and clear
that they seemed to see far beyond the years you had lived.
You used to remind people of a cherub. You used to be happy
and confident and funny. You used to be a bright shining
star at the center of a blonde, blue-eyed, curly-headed
perfect universe. Your teacher told your parents that you
were squinting at the blackboard. You got thick glasses.
Nobody noticed how blue your eyes were after that. Your
hair changed from tumbling curls to unmanageable frizz. The
strawberry-blonde took on a non-descript mousy-red tone.
Stuff happened. Day by day, bit by almost imperceptibly bit,
the perfection slowly vanished until even the memory was
so faded that you believed you must have dreamed it. By the
time you were twelve, well-meaning adults were suggesting
that you wear a roll-on to hide your flabby pre-pubescent
belly. Even the kinder ones, the adults who told you it was
just ‘puppy fat’, succeeded in underlining your burgeoning
and inevitable faith in your own plainness. You grew to be
a shy and awkward young adult. You were socially inept. You
created a façade of bravado. You came across as too pushy,
too cocky and smug. You never interacted from a place of
truth. You had forgotten by then that such a place existed.
Even if you had not forgotten, you would have been too
terrified to explore it. By thirty you had managed to shape
yourself into a reasonably acceptable human being. You
seemed to be fully functioning and relatively normal in all
you did. You had children of your own and did your best to
keep them secure and confident in their own perfection.
You did your best to vaccinate them against soul-destroying
self-doubt. You did your very best. Then there was nobody
else to look after and it was your time again. Your hair was
grey and your skin was wrinkled but old photographs showed
you that you were never plain and you were never fat. Your
eyes had lost their open innocence but they were still as
blue. The lie you had been living for so long dissolved and
you discovered that she was still there. The once-perfect
child, open-hearted and trusting, had waited a lifetime for
you to come back. And you recognized that you are, and
always have been, beautiful.

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