Dear Attractiveness...
I see you leaving
Paid subscribers can listen to an audio version of this essay by clicking the player at the bottom of the page! Thanks for your support. xoxo
I appreciate that you’re leaving gently, letting me down easy, as opposed to completely disappearing one sudden rainy morning, but I see you going, piece by piece. I see you leaving in the slants at the side of my mouth, as if you’re drawing them down with you as you go. I see you taking the color of my hair as you depart. I see you taking my cheekbones, like a thing you covet, hiding them under your breast pocket, as if you need them for someone else. I see it in the lines on my face that you’re leaving leaves behind, and in my eyes, which were always a large, blue asset, somehow becoming smaller in the circle of my face as you go.
To tell the truth, I didn’t believe this time would come. I thought you’d always be with me. I knew, intellectually, that this type of thing happens, but it was always to other women, older women, unlucky women, the kind of women I’d never be. That’s how you think when you’re younger: Nothing you don’t want to happen will ever happen to you. But here we are. I can see you flittering on the edges, restless and done with me, but too kind to leave me in one fell swoop.
I know some women chase you, especially these days. They run after you like predators run after prey. While I don’t mind taking the time to cultivate you, lovingly, thoughtfully, the way I cultivate the garden, ritualize you even, I can’t keep up with you. I can’t chase you. I sometimes think I might try—an injection here, a lift there, a suction there. If I’m honest, I might give it a go if it weren’t for the cost. If I’m honest, I’d so like to keep you here a bit longer, enamored with me, that I might chase you if I had the income to do so. But then again, that’s not who I want to be, not really, a woman chasing attractiveness, panting for it, killing myself for it. It’s a race I don’t want to run. I want you to love me now as I am, not as I was. I feel you slipping backwards, out of me, looking for someone fresh to pour yourself into. My vessel doesn’t hold like it used to. I understand—you want someone solid, someone on the up, while I am on the descent, still strong and healthy (knock wood) but showing cracks here and there, one season at a time.
I catch my reflection in mirrors and I see a stranger. Sometimes I stare, wondering if what I’m seeing is real. Maybe I’m making it up. Maybe it’s not as real as I think it is. I notice I take fewer photographs of myself, and when I do, I cringe at the images afterward. I never thought I was vain, but perhaps, looking back, I was; my appearance was currency. I spent it carelessly, like someone unaccustomed to lack. I spent it thoughtlessly, like someone who doesn’t believe in endings. I heard an old movie star say that beauty and aging is like being rich and becoming poor. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I understand it now. It’s like a treasure chest you bathe in, all the jewels slopping out, but what do you care, what does it matter to lose a couple jewels hither and thither when you’re covered in them. Then one day, suddenly, you only have a few left. They don’t cover you anymore. Your parts are showing. The younger girls drip with jewels, but yours have vanished. You have to get up and get out of the chest. We need this, ma’am, life says. We need this for someone else….
And I’ll say something you’re not supposed to say: Children age you, and I’ve had two of them. You’re not supposed to say that because children are blessings. They are, but also they age you. They stretch your body. They take your nutrients. Then their born and they take your sleep. The first thing any doctor worth their salt will tell you is that lack of sleep negatively impacts your health, as well as your physical appearance. They take the time you had before to care for yourself. Their health, not yours, becomes your focus. All of that ages you. So maybe, in the design of all things, when a woman gets to this stage, other things should be more important than you. You shouldn’t be something that matters as much when God sends into our lives, into our bodies, something beyond ourselves, something greater and more beautiful than we ever were. You’re just supposed to be here with us for a while, a season of life, but we get so attached to you, we get so incredibly addicted to your currency we can’t accept that we’ll run out of you. No matter how we chase or hunt or cling, you’re going to leave.
It would be easier to let you go if other women were okay with letting you go. If it were, say, the time of my ancestors, a time not terribly long ago where we lived in the stage we’re in and didn’t chase what we’re losing. But it’s not okay to look like a grandmother anymore. Grandmothers look like mothers. Mothers look like daughters. Daughters, oddly, look like adults, in a flip-flop, topsy-turvy inversion of all natural order. I could lean into it more if it didn’t look, from the outside, like I was letting myself go, like I was failing. It feels, these days, like to look your age is a failure of your will, instead of the natural procession of things.
I want, in my bones, to not care at all, but it’s hard to say goodbye to you. I want to care only about my children, my land, the animals in my care, my husband, my family and the other vulnerable, gentle things that have been entrusted to me in this dark, demonic world. I want to be at peace with your leaving so that it doesn’t cause me grief. A deep, honest, dare I say, beautiful peace. I look at photographs of my younger self, when I thought you’d always be at my side, and I even see women who are young and attractive now, and I feel a yearning for that beauty again that makes me uncomfortable; a yearning that makes me feel inauthentic, fickle, distracted. Maybe, even, a bit pathetic. What’s more pathetic than someone who doesn’t know when to say goodbye? What’s sadder than the person who holds on too long?
So just know that I see you, now, in way I didn’t see you before. I was brutish with you. You were mine and I owned it. You were mine and I galloped through the world with you, but I didn’t see you the way I do now. I see you stealing yourself away, piece by piece, year by year, and I wish you could stay, and I wish I lived in a world where it was okay to let you go, and in the meantime I’m in this space, this liminal, shrouded, murky space, suspended between have and have not, becoming, if not already fully, invisible, which once upon a time would’ve felt like a blessing when it was hard to walk down the street without feeling like the world was a stage, when all I wanted was a break in being stared at, and now it’s here, and while I do like it—the pressure off, the focus off, the ease of movement—it feels bittersweet, here, in the liminal, shrouded, finding a way to accept your departure and my descent from your graces.
You know what would be beautiful? Really, attractively beautiful? That acceptance. That grace. That letting go. That saying goodbye. That unclinging. Not chasing what isn’t yours. Not grasping for what doesn’t belong to you anymore. That is attractive. That’s beauty.
I’m working on finding a way forward without you, a way to still be beautiful without your witchy spell, to be attractive in a way that is different, not of this world. Not this world, at least, that chases and clings and wants forever 21 and forever 35. This world that wants the past to be the future, faces frozen in time, beauty without nature. I have to find a new way to radiate without your effortless magic. To be beautiful in the way autumn sunflowers are, or winter’s trees, or the leaves, falling, or the snow, blanketing the barren land; an attractiveness that points to the truth of things, the raw, real, bittersweet, majestic truth of things.
I’ve written on this topic before, in a different way, here and here.
Thanks for being here with me, truly.
