beauty...

january wind blows through
my heart in august
i scratch patterns
in the frost on the
windows, making them
my own
hoping that someone
on the outside
will find them beautiful

i am taking your challenge to heart, dear Jordan, if not to head, because my heart, poor, battered, beaten and troubled thing that it is, still longs for the type of beauty you seek, the bright and happy beauty of the sunlight instead of the soft, subtle, and desperate beauty of the shadows that live because the sunlight gives them life.
my heart sees poems frozen suspended in the winter air and wants only to breath its warmth upon the words, to thaw each poem, cradle it, tell it that it is loved for being what it is, that it is beautiful.
But my mind arrives first, by virtue of faster wit, and gaily shatters all the pretty frozen dreams into sharp shards, so that he can throw them at passers-by, calling his wounding actions "cleverness" to justify his cruelty.
i am tired of cutting my feet on these shards, of knowing that it was my own mind that broke my hope, that scattered it's deadly cold slivers deliberately underfoot, knowing that i would have to walk that way, leaving them to slip into my soft skin like a warm and comfortable robe, making my walk all the more painful in their rest.
so perhaps the beautiful thing, the happiest thing, that i can say, is that i DO still hope. that try though i might, i can't turn it off, that even when i want to destroy my life, all i REALLY want, all i really NEED, is a reason, any reason, to save it, to keep it, to love it. to love myself.
and the reason, as always, is dancing just on the tip of my tongue, seducing those around me with it's exotic curves and mysterious smile, the one that mocks me in the mirror and engages me to speak one more time, and so i keep speaking, even if most of it is in a language that i know but don't understand, hoping that one day i will accidentally blurt out the words that will make me everything else mean something to me.
so what am i really trying to say, as i fail the challenge, is that i don't understand happiness. i laugh when things are funny, and i smile when i am with friends that share my sense of humor. but "happiness" eludes me.
even the hope i sometimes manage to touch, to hold for a few short breaths, a few short bars of a song i love and will sing until i die, isn't really happy, because each time it comes and brings me to life it reminds me of the void to which it will soon enough abandon me, sacrificing me to its volcanic absence as it rides winds of greater strength than anything my feeble lungs can manufacture. and although my life is colder for it's absense, i don't begrudge it's choice.
but the hope continues, maybe not happiness, but the belief in the possibility of happiness, however remote, however elusive. and that hope, when it is not slowly crippling me with its mercy, is the only thing that keeps me alive.
i live. i breathe. i hope.
this is all the beauty i can offer.
my shadows live because the sun lives. my hope breathes because the sun breathes. i know happiness exists because it gives shape to my sorrow, and i know my sorrow is small in comparison to the light from which it hides, but when there is no more hiding, when there is nothing but light, happiness will be resplendent. and i will be free.
i live. i brethe. i hope.
it might not be happiness, but it is not always sad, and there is cheer in the color of truth's cheeks, even when tears run down their sides.