Beautiful Us

Long blonde hair and eyes like cocaine razorblades, twenty-seven years old, with a voice that feels as raw and dirty as the cigarette smoke swirling around her. She moves on the stage, her body playing teasing games with my heart; her motion is wild graceful, like a tornado that loves you. A skinny white t-shirt clinging to her curves.. leather boots.. she is singing in the back of the bar, in front of an huge, grungy American flag; red and yellow filtered lights casting spells down over her lyrics and over my mind. I stand there looking up into her face, this rebellious angel of sinful poems - love child of dangerous beautiful.
I raise my bottle to my lips and take a long, cold sip of Budwiser.

In that moment, rock music blaring in my ears, my eyes blurry from smoke and beer - all I could think about was how absolutely beautiful we can be. I looked up at the blonde haired goddess on stage, and admired her confidence, her sway, her love for herself. Like a fire inside my bones, it makes me feel hot and alive when I see beauty on display like that. Not the cookie-cutter beautiful that magazines try to sell us.. but real sexiness: emotional, honest, imperfect. For her, beauty was exactly what she made it.. her own unique, perfect motion. A smile broke across my lips as I thought about that, and I took another long sip of Budwiser.
I believe that the truest, most seductive beauty comes from an internal confidence; a realization that each of us decides our own definition of beautiful. With my interaction with the opposite sex, the women that I find most alluring are rarely stereotypical sex symbols.. pimped, primmed, overly injected manaquins. Instead, I am more deeply attracted to the sensuality of a person who sets their own standard as to how and why they are beautiful. A woman that exudes confidence in her own beauty (no matter how beautiful she may be), is far more sexy than one attempting to fit the mass-marketed idea of sensuality.
On a personal level, I find myself setting imaginary requirements on my appearance, on my body, on my diet.. and then feeling failure if I do not meet them. But why? If I'm making the rules up... doesn't that take off all the pressure? We create our own beauty... we set the standards, we say exactly how we want to look, we decide the definition to beauty - and when we do that, it belongs to us again.. we do it, because we want to.

We are continually sold the idea: "Be Beautiful.".
Not because you want to.. but because you MUST in order to be accepted. That leaves me with a sick feeling in the back of my throat. I would argue, be your own beautiful - there is nothing we must become, no acceptance we must earn, no standard that we must fit.
Will we trade our joy and pleasure for someone else's idea of beautiful? Or will we create our own?

beautiful, is entirely about you.






Andrew Tipton