Beauty in a Bowl.

Have you ever heard of that saying . . . that seeing the light thing? It's something metaphorical, with a double meaning, but thing is: it doesn't have any meaning for me.

I've never seen the light. Or any light.

I can feel it though; warm and rich and sometimes a bit cruel.

I can only feel things and it is frustrating because when I hear them, those other girls with the ice-delicate voices, say they feel things that are not usually physical, the cuffs of forced ignorance scalded like hellfire. They feel love. They feel sadness. They feel hate. And most importantly,

they feel pretty.

And prettiness is for people who can see it. You can value beauty, being pretty, if you can only see it. But does it mean that it has to be meaningless for people, like me, who can't?

My eyes may be blind to faces, but my skin, my mind are open to the vast diverse sea of feelings, floating all over me. Voices are the colors of my world, the fish of my sea; the colors are the sensations, are the ornaments to my Christmas tree heart; though the only thing I know of them is that they're delicate, sensitive to the touch and hollow. They melt into crisp fragments, crisp breaks when you step on them, crush them. I mean the sound of those crisp breaks is like little nightingales having a party in my ear. A breaking party. With their little bones snapping and crunching all over my ears. But I'm not talking about the broken bones or their snapping. I'm talking about their broken songs. The song of the bleeding throat, as Whitman put it (with words birthing rhythms). I hear the song, the nightingale chant being broken.

Well, that's what I hear.

And I can feel the colors, which is more than they can say. Red is said to be fiery, passionate, but I can feel it wet, liquid and listless. Blue is said to be cold, sad, blue, but it cools my unpretty heart and soothes my fingertips.

Their visions of colors are somber satire, of my failure, to me and my feelings; my sensations of colors are laughable parody, of your success, to you.
I dreamt of colors that never existed. I painted new worlds with them and saw them come to life. Just because I cannot see, it does not mean I cannot see. I can see through my fingers, my ears, my nose and my tongue. I can see in four different ways.

Sight is more than eyes. It is a collection of consciousness. But only the blind can see that.

A little girl came to me once, wondering why am I different and how am I different. I told her I cannot see. She told me she can't see too. I asked her how. She said that she has to get up on her toes to see, because everything is so big. Everything was adult-sized, and she was so small that she can't see anything without lifting herself up.

"I can't see without mommy or daddy lifting me up. The chair and the window are too high." And I laughed at how similar and different we are. Our concepts of sight are different. But we both need help in order to see. She was little in a big world, but she'll grow up to be big as well. I am little and white in this mute-black huge world and the world will never be as white as me, nor will I be as black as the world.
I raked all that in my mind as the girl kept talking and holding my hand. She had the softest hands I've ever touched; so pure and tender. They felt white and smooth. She was a blind little white thing, too.
Later on, she had to leave and as her feet were clicking away, I sat on a nearby bench and I cried. I cried my dead eyes until they began to sparkle on the inside. The colors, the textures, they all came alive for me afterwards. I tried to see. Not like everyone else.

I tried to see what I had right in front of me. I tried to color up myself. Used lipstick, eyeshadow, mascara and all what I could get just to be colorful. I asked people I barely speak with to color me up. A girl who I knew through pure chance told me I looked beautiful. I asked her how did I look beautiful and she didn't answer as she wasn't there to begin with. She was the first person to knock the idea of beauty into my head. And somehow that took me off of my quest for color and made me cling onto the pursuit of 'beauty', just like any other woman that can see and be seen.

I was growing up. I was done being little and white in a world that I could not grasp. Beauty was there to compensate and it was colorful and it was there to be seen.

I am here now, in front of cold glass that never gets warm, and I'm holding onto thick tubes, all of different lengths, but all cold as well. Next to my left arm are flattish squares and circles, filled with compressed smoothness. To my right arm are fluffy tissues that won't be used. I start with the shortest tube and apply it on my lips, its insides are pasty and sloppy and feel like mud, but they are granting me beauty. I leave it to scramble for one of the squares and just take which one feels the coldest. It takes me a while to open it, but it finally opens. I take a hold of the soft sponge, which I've felt many times before but never dared to lift, and merge it with the powder that lands on my cheeks at first then every other part of my face. It's suffocating, feels ugly, but it is beauty and it covers and colors me up. Then comes the big tube, mascara, which painfully pulls apart my lids and lashes. Painful and stiff, but it makes me feel beautiful; feel fine beauty in its prickly ends.

The mirror isn't talking back to me when I'm done, thus I feel unsettled. I never expected it to talk, did I? Only eyes can talk to mirrors. Thus, to beauty, I am mute as well. I am still blotched with white and I can't find another little girl to make feel alive and seek colors again.

Maybe my blindness is not in my eyes. It is in my consciousness. It is in my heart. What kind of heart would like to hear breaking songs if it is not a heart that needs breaking? A heart broken-up by the need to see what other hearts do. A heart broken by the world it lives in, by the shut ribcage it lives in.

I'm crying again, feeling all my so-called beauty run all over my face to smear and sting my eyes: the dead eyes of a dead heart. There was no light to be seen to begin with. It was all metaphorical and if that's still the case, then I haven't seen it still. But maybe it did see me at one point, except that it's a worthless thought now. Similar to those earlier notions of seeing; voices are merely a thread of a faint dream compared to real colors. The outline of an incomprehensible dream. A dream so big that you only manage to see a fraction of it. You only get to hold on to that precise fraction, hoping you'll someday sew the pieces together and live that patched dream. I only have voices, textures and a distorted image of color to complement what I want.

The mirror only sees who can see it. Just like the whole world. The whole group of girls with snowflake-delicate voices can’t see how delicate their voices are. Only I can. In a sense, I can see what cannot be seen. But that which I want is that which can be seen. Maybe seen sight; only the scene of sight. Not this crippled darkness and this mutilated sight: white, solid and without limits in a limited line-infested world where everything is precise and clear-cut. A spacious entity of darkness that engulfs the littleness of me. That is my world which won’t change.

No matter how high I step on my toes, I will not see above what is meant for me. That is how we are different: that girl and I.

Beauty is running all over my face and escaping to the floor, which, for me, is merged with everything else. Beauty is merging with the floor, with the walls and my fingers. Invisible colors are melting to equally invisible colors and nothing changes, except me and my spiraling thoughts.