“It was her chaos that made her beautiful.” – atticus

Her chaos defined nothing, because that is what chaos means. Her beauty wasn’t bound to the idea that she ran through life as a wildfire or some gulf hurricane. What made her beautiful was the light she could give to herself that seemed bright enough to bring others out of darkness. Her storms were wonderous to observe, but it was the sunshine after that created the chance for love.

Why are people obsessed with the idea of loving something we cannot define? Is it because we lack the right words to capture what it is that captivates our hearts and minds so thoroughly? Chaos…that’s a terrible word to describe anything. It’s a word to describe a high-speed car crash, or the feeling a soldier experiences on an active battlefield. Chaos is laziness, because everything that doesn’t fit into a person’s set idea of “the plan” would be chaos, and since people are terrible at planning, everything always seems to fall apart, at least a tiny bit.

Her chaos is her unraveling, and that is so fundamentally different from her showing herself to you. It’s not beautiful to fall apart. There is nothing pretty about crying into the arms of your friends at 2AM after you tried to say goodbye. There is nothing captivating about being so angry your skin flares red like a firecracker, with a voice to match. It’s raw, and real, and it’s all of us on our worst days, and it’s on those days we all wish for love, for someone to just hug as and not let go first. It’s our chaos, and we shouldn’t hide it from the world, and we especially shouldn’t hide it from ourselves, but to say that is what makes us beautiful?

I want to be beautiful because I take my nephews to go see the new Star Wars like a good uncle, and we pig out on candy and soda and we laugh the entire car-ride to the theater and back.

I want to be beautiful for the project I helped my co-workers finish 1 week early, where my skills on Excel were put to the test and I came out on top, and I was praised and proud of myself for not only getting the work done, but because I know I was useful and I haven’t felt useful in so Goddamn long it almost made me cry.

I want to be beautiful for taking the time to let that car merge into my lane to get around that small fender bender during rush hour. I am always the car that lets people over, because I’m never in a rush to get anywhere, and people always wave and smile and it makes me think that I’m doing something right, even if it’s small and nobody will remember it.

I want to be beautiful for keeping calm on the phone when the bank messed up my credit card (which was a real problem, but I understood that it had nothing to do with the person on the phone and they were so relieved when I expressed this that they thanked me because they had already had a very terrible day and I’m happy I managed to give them a tiny bit of relief).

And she wants to be beautiful for all those moments, every single one, not just the messy ones. She needs someone to be there for the chaos, so be there, but don’t think that chaos is her beauty. That implies when she finds a way to quell that chaos she will have lost a vital part of herself, when in reality she will have just learned how to tame some wild beast, and that is to be applauded.

“It was her chaos that made her beautiful.”

No.

It was HER that makes her beautiful.