You Look Beautiful

My mother never felt beautiful.

She never felt comfortable enough in her own skin to dance with my father and I in the refrigerator light. She couldn't bear to look at herself in the mirror for more than 5 minutes or to do her makeup. She cried in the shower while she thought I was sleeping. She starved herself and yet, always made me eat more.

She told me I was beautiful while never fully believing that for herself.

My grandmother never felt like a woman.

She prided herself by being a tomboy, the only son in her family. She went to an all-girls school, so she never knew how to act around men. Looking at all the girls around her fawning over the boys next door, she longed to feel that way. To feel their eyes on her in that same adoration.

Her father pulled her by her ear and pushed her into a closet so she wouldn't be seen.

She married a man that made her feel beautiful. But she wanted someone who made her feel loved.

My best friend wants to be loved.

She knows that platonic love and romantic love are 2 very different feelings. She's never been on the receiving end of something romantic even though that is her only wish in life.

We have both read too many romance books and watched too many movies that we now expect men to act the same way.

I tell her that she's beautiful, but I know that it feels different than when a boy tells her.

My boyfriend doesn't like to be complimented.

He doesn't believe that the words that I give him mean everything to me.

He feels his best when he's sweating on a court playing a game that he knows won't last. But those 20 minutes are all he lives for. He jumps into my arms when he wins and cries when he loses.

He looks beautiful either way.

I don’t know how I feel.

Some days I wake up and feel my skin shift over the bones that my mother created. I wear the clothes that grandmother paid for and write in the journal that my best friend got.

I go to my boyfriend's game with her and I tell her, “You look beautiful”.

He cries in my arms on the train ride home and I truly think, “He looks beautiful”.

Everything I see, touch, hear. It is all beautiful.

For how can beauty that is living be anything but true?

 Dove is a 15 year old girl living in Japan. As a half Japanese, half American girl, she has always battled with beauty standards and the idea of beauty in each culture. She writes, even if it’s not good, to set her emotions in stone.