I catch your scent in the crook of the horizon—tolerant and kind, blossoming and fresh. I breathe in deeply, storing this scent to memory. I remember it again as I trace the silhouettes of treetops against the night sky, delicate leaves waving with the wind, triumphantly at the top of the world. I remember it when I lay on sun-warmed ground, when my skin glows golden in the afternoon sun.
I think of you.
You who approach me at the wrong times, in the most creative of ways. A careless wave of fingers, a raised lilt of speech. I spy you creeping in muddy puddles that frame the gleaming sun, or in tastes that carry me to another place in time, a memory of, again, you.
Beauty. In a thought, in a color, in a touch. You come to me unexpectedly, distracting from the rules we made for life. I yearn to seek you out, fill my mind, my every sense, my soul with you, until even my love for you, this obsession, derangement, inaccuracy becomes you too, until I become you, beauty.
Try as I might, I can’t capture your nuance or shade. Your inflection points are too blinding to be instructive. I can’t fit you into the so-called rigors of life I have been told to live, I am losing a place for you in the corner of my eye.
You blinded me to the world society inhabits, but now you begin to grow blind to me.
Soon I may not see you at all, I may remember you as what may have been, should have been, but is no more. Better memory than reality. Better imagination than memory. In my imagination, I might try to capture your essence, the way I remember it, but it will be nothing more than a shoddy recreation of your power.
Beauty, I want you in my life. I want my life to be filled with you, to be you. I want to revel in your grace and impossibility, celebrate the beauty I see at every turn. I want to erase the world and rewrite it with enduring breaths of beauty at every pause. Would I find you if time stopped? If I extricated myself from the confines of a time that doesn’t descend, if I sidled onto other paths parallel, or perpendicular, to mine? Would you be there, unraveling your inevitability in stillness?
Beauty, how do I keep you?
Niharika Rajan Sinha writes to find meaning, as many writers do. She studied neuroscience as an undergraduate at New York University and was most recently an interdisciplinary studies fellow at Alliance University, Bengaluru.
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