What Am I Supposed to Be?

They told her straight hair was beautiful.

Then someone praised the curls.

Someone else said bangs made a girl prettier.

Another said,
“No, keep your forehead bare.”

Wear makeup.

No, keep it natural.

Show your shape.

No, hide it beneath something oversized.

Be delicate.

Be striking.

Be effortless.

Be perfect.

And somewhere between
all those voices,

she began to wonder,

What am I supposed to be?

So she stood before the mirror
and searched herself
for the answer.

She questioned her hair.

Her face.

Her shape.

Every little thing
she had once accepted
until the world handed her
a hundred different definitions
of beautiful.

And somehow,

none of them
looked like her.

Yet somewhere else,
a boy was asking himself
a completely different question.

Not,

“What makes her beautiful?”

But,

“What is it about her
that I can't stop remembering?”

And he thought of her silly jokes,

the way her laughter
arrived before she could stop it,

her little bursts of temper,

the strange warmth
she carried into ordinary moments.

He searched for something
he could name.

Something his friends
would understand.

Something he could point to
and say,

“That. That's why.”

But there was nothing.

Because it wasn't her hair.

Not the curls.

Not the straightness.

Not the bangs.

Not the absence of them.

It wasn't her makeup
or the shape beneath her clothes.

It was something
the world had forgotten
to put on its list.

It was simply

her.

And perhaps
that is what makes beauty
so cruelly confusing.

We are taught
a thousand different ways
to become beautiful,

until we forget
that we were never meant
to become someone else
in the first place.