Girls on Beaches

I’m looking at a generation of girls who reject the word beautiful. Who’d rather be pinned against a wall by boys whose names they won’t remember. They don’t want to remember. Girls who are afraid of butterflies because that kind of vibrance on an insect shouldn’t be. Girls who rock back and forth on their feet when they speak, and I remember how I used to rock back and forth in my white dress in church on Easter Sunday, standing before the alter, while the priest talked about deliverance, and all I could think of was how the stained glass windows were tinting the light that was trying to get in. I never liked that they put “beauty” in the dictionary, because when you define something you put it in a box that you toss in your car on your road trip to California, pretending that you’re Jack Kerouac, but that boy you’re kissing is not Jack Kerouac, because Kerouac understood that “beautiful” is a mirage in front of 7 billion individual grains of sand that you literally have to light on fire to get the glass that they put in church windows, but I never wanted to burn for something I didn’t believe in. Don’t tell me about the sublime, until you’ve seen it outlined in cigarette burns on a girl’s wrist, or written in the smoke that rises from her cherry red lips, all the way up to where the clouds wave palms at people whose greatest fear is to be vulnerable. The most beautiful thing I ever saw was the relief in a girl’s eyes when she realized that the hands that had her pinned against a wall were her own, that if she put out the cigarette, she could say “beautiful” herself so that she’d never have to see a Judgment Day. Tell the priest not to turn away. Tell him not to cover his ears when I’m singing Hallelujah to a highway, not to cover his eyes when I’m reading poetry in a pew. I’ve already read the bible. It tried to latch onto my wrist, but Andrea Gibson held my hand and handed me a pen and told me that beauty is laced into the sand. Sometimes it flies in your face. Sometimes it hurts, but there is nothing warmer than burrowing your toes into the coast line and letting it grow you, like the roses in your mother’s garden, the ones your father cut his hands on picking flowers for their anniversary. There are some things we don’t have rights to, like when you see a girl with sand in her hair Saying things like, “Hey, I swear I saw Jesus walking out of a record store the other day.” Don’t try to tell her God isn’t in her music. Let her be.