A Way to Stop, Drop, and Let Go

I don’t know what beauty looks like to someone else.
And I don’t know what the word beautiful means to you.
I don’t know what you see or as I have said before, I have no idea what the color red looks like through your eyes.

I know that we are all taught about color or what color looks like. We have all been taught about the colors of the rainbow, as in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
I remember when this was broken down to an acronym in grade school.
We were told to see the colors of the rainbow as our friendly person in the sky named, Roy G Biv.
Remember?

I know that we have talked about this before
I know what color looks like to me. And I know that people have shared their sentiments with me about color.
I am told this is red or this is blue. I learned about this long ago and so have you.
I know about the shades of orange, like when the sun comes up over the horizon in the morning. The sky lights with pastel shades of pink, orange and purple.
I know it is a beautiful thing to see the sun appear like a yolk in the palm of the new morning sky.
And I know how meaningful this looks to me.

I say this represents a new-day’s freedom.

Anything can happen.
I can walk away and separate myself from the days before now. I can see the world in a brand-new way.
I can change my mind. I can change my direction.
I can pick up a new hobby. Or in fact, I can do a number of things to change the way I interact with the world.
There is no rule that says I have to live in the past. Last I checked, there is no law that states I have to be unhappy or live a certain way.
I can change my mind at any given moment.
See?

I can look at the sky whenever I want. I can notice the beautiful things around me and see the sights of the world. There is no law that says I have to look for the ugliest details or live in the darkness of my own thinking.

As this pertains to depression or depressive thinking, there is no law that states it is impossible for me to improve or recover.
No one can stop me from experiencing the gift of improvement.

I know what it means to be punished. And I certainly understand what it means to punish myself or believe that it is me, that I am the fool or that I am at fault.
I am to blame.
Me. Myself. And I.

I can appreciate the weight of my own scrutiny, which is something that I call relatable.
At the same time, I can appreciate the visions of hope.

Even at my worst, I can say that I have seen the sky at its best.

I remember being young as ever. I was wild and hateful too.
I remember being in the worst kind of trouble. In fact, I was sitting in a cage.
I was sick as could be.
I was unforgivably young and ignorant and scared and petrified of the war stories I had heard about jails and shower-room rape.

I knew about the violence of other men. I knew that I did not have the strength or the frame to defend myself in places like this.
I was about to be arraigned and sitting in holding cells with drunks and crooks and criminals who were all too familiar with jailhouse politics.
But this was not me.
I was not about that life.
I was not that person and was I never that person nor could I have been.

I was trained to lie. I was trained to be someone I never could have been.
I was trained to be ugly.
I was trained to believe that I was a failure, or that I was stupid and that I was a joke.
Only, I was the last one to laugh or realize that I was the punchline.

I remember sitting in a small holding cell for the first time. I sat on the hardest bench, looking up at the window. I saw something.
The windows were up high, just below ceiling height. The discomfort of the heat and the humidity was clearly the cause of the smell of sweat and body odor.

This is not to exclude the aromas of urine and other ungodly smells, which was covered by some kind of bleach-like disinfectant that was not strong enough to mask the stench of dirty jail cells and aggressive men.
I was young and too thin. I was weak and too light to fight (too thin to win) and I was afraid, yet there was something to be seen.
I could see the partly opened window.
There was something beautiful out there.

The windows were slim in height and wide at their width.  
The top row of window sashes were tilted outwards, and I was able to view the sky.
I knew there was freedom outside of this place. And I knew that this was going to be something that the authorities would look to take away from me. I was about to lose things, such as my freedom, my association with the sunrise, my views and my assumptions of beauty.
All of this were about to be subjects of change.

I sat in the unclean thickness of remanufactured air.
I sat amongst the filth of other men, and I listened to the howls of local drunks as they sung their vomit into the stainless-steel commodes, puking their guts in their holding cell.

I was surrounded by hateful people and violence and crime, yet I looked up through the slivered crack of the outward-tilted window.
I could see the nighttime sky.
I could see a few stars. I could see how the night became morning and while my view was limited, I saw the miraculous change of night as it faded to dawn’s first light.

I was in an ugly place and still, there was something beautiful.
I suppose beauty can never die or be killed. I suppose beauty is more than a look or an association with perfectness.

I suppose there is a reason why beauty and love run parallel and yes, there are times when I was incarcerated (or about to be) and there were times when I was locked in a holding cell, whether figurative or literal is irrelevant; however, there were times, like recently, when I was in my own dungeon.
I looked outside of a partial view, and there was something beautiful.
There was you . . .
I was surrounded by ugliness and lies and deceit. I was part of this ongoing cycle that kept me in the underbelly of misfortune.
There was nothing beautiful about my circumstance. At the same time, there was always something beautiful to see.

You . . .
. . . you are like nothing I have ever seen.

You are like the new sun which I saw from the crack of a window and all else was obscene.
Your face and the thoughts of your smile or the memories which I have begun to collect are like the stars I saw from my limited porthole.
You are like the feeling of rejoice that I had in my little jail cell.

I was kept like a prisoner but still, I had something beautiful to look at.
And this set me free.
That’s what I call beautiful.

Now, to be fair —
I know this sounds like so much.

But . . .

I understand what it is like to be unaware of myself. I know how it is to look in the mirror and see nothing attractive or desirable.
I understand the ideas of inaccurate reflections from the reflectors around me.

What is beauty to me?
Beauty is something that can never die. Beauty can never be killed or butchered or molested and destroyed. At least not your beauty because, to me, this is truly beautiful.
 
To me, beauty is like sitting and watching the heavy rain from my window seat on an early morning train.

Beauty is my reminder that there is ugliness around me. There are ugly features, which show themselves to me, repeatedly, as if to occur and repeat on a daily basis.  

Beauty can never die but I will say this: beauty can be fooled and tricked and poisoned by the narcissist and coerced into believing that beauty is ugly.
But you are not ugly.
You have never been ugly and you will never be ugly.

I read a quote where someone compared their drive in a rainstorm and the moment of reprieve that takes place when driving beneath a bridge — the rain stops for a second and the chattering raindrops cease for a brief spell. To the author, this was a comparison of love. And while sad but beautiful, I applaud this analogy.

Beauty is a moment or reprieve and a spell of freedom that breaks us away from the ugly features we see. Beauty is the reminder of shelter in unthinkable storms. And yes, the absence of beauty is ugly, but beauty is never gone.

No.
Know how I know?
I know because of you.

I know this because despite the fights and the arguments and the pains or the sins from my past; I see you in my thoughts and I find myself thinking about my dreams.
I think about you and the combination of you and I, and how we abandon everything that happened before, just so we can have something beautiful now.

You are more than beautiful. Yet, you don’t believe me.
You are beyond beautiful,
but you have been stolen by the thievery of narcissism.
I am unclean and perhaps unworthy, which is why I am where I am, and you are where you are.

I do not want to be like other men, filthy and criminal.
I do not want to trick or steal to take anything away, but you asked what I think love is.
And love is beautiful.
True love can never die. It can be tricked, and love can dissolve beneath the weight of toxic mass.
Love can be suffocated and drowned. But like The Son of Man, love in its truest from can be reincarnated and rise from the dead.

Beauty is everywhere.
Beauty exists, even in sad depressions and ugly or anxious whereabouts.
I know this for a fact because at my worst, I saw your face and when I was at my least worth, I saw your smile.
You asked me what I think beauty is —

To me, beauty is lifesaving.
The oasis of the world . . .

Just like you:
a reprieve from the rain
and a way to enjoy the storm.

Beautiful –

That’s you.