This is "pretty" in our town

A few years ago in english class we read a play called Our Town. A conversation from the play:

"Am I pretty?"

"Pretty enough for all practical purposes."

I'm sure my mid-pubescent eighth grade self skimmed a Spark Noted summary of this conversation the day before the assignment was due, an assignment much less relevant to my life than whether or not I should straighten or scrunch my hair for the school picture and whether the blonde haired boy in my biology class was looking at me today. Five years worth of puberty and gel-saturated hair, I realize that although the content of the play itself is hazy in my memory, this particular conversation has been immaculately preserved. Has, apparently, lodged itself somewhere deep within my prefrontal cortex.

I've often wondered what it is about this conversation that made it attach itself to my cerebrum and hang on surreptitiously for five plus years, long after the blonde haired boy and The Scrunched Hair Dilemma dissolved into the black hole of pre-pubescent memories. (Thank god for that black hole).

As much as I would like to say that physical appearances are superficial and irrelevant, if I'm being honest with myself, that could not be farther from the truth. As a society we romanticize and idealize beauty, place it on a pedestal and fuss over it. We say beauty is irrelevant, that it is less imporant than "a good sense of humor and a great personality," while we spend hundreds on teeth whitening products and makeup and push up bras, as though physical appearances define our worth as a person. Which, in doing so, has become the case.

I don't at all mean for this to sound feminist. I don't mean to argue that our idealization of physical beauty is wrong or right or immoral or appropriate or inappropriate or whatever.

It just is.

And that's why this conversation, from Our Town, is so relevant. To subjugate "prettiness" to "practicality," to say that one is "pretty enough for all practical purposes" seems unfitting and foreign. We like to think that physical beauty is intangible, that it's poetic and romantic and whimsical, a transcendent truth that surpasses all ideas of realism and practicality. But ultimately, what purpose does it serve but a practical one?

What purpose does anything serve but a practical one?

The most terrifying thing in this life

Is to realize you're nothing special.

Good evening synapses, I'm Emma.

Sixteen years taken for granted in this house and the knowledge that this is my last night spent breathing the calm air of this room comes reluctantly, feels sudden and sureal and too far to grasp. My ears are perked and my eyes wide, for the first time, to the sights and sounds that falling asleep in this house make. The wind combing through the branches outside my window. The neighborhood dogs belting their nighttime ritual. I recall labeling these sounds disturbing, as less valuable than silence, but in the light of the last night they are peaceful and harmonious. A welcomed disturbance in an unwavering pattern of ignorance, habituation, and misplaced priorities.

Your fingertips

Your fingertips left tracks along my body as they moved, sensually but swiftly across my skin. Tracks that, to this day, still smolder and smoke, long after the scent of your own skin has vanished. Where are your scars, I wonder? Do you wear them proudly upon your skin? Or do you treat them, still, as fresh wounds, bandaging, cradling, nurturing their surface? Who sees them, I wonder. Do you?