This may have been the longest journey of my life. Searching through the wreckage of memories and indentations to decipher what it means to be beautiful.
At a local cafe, I still taste red velvet cake on my tongue as I leaf through discarded “men’s magazine” with blond-haired breasts woman on the cover. The theme of this issue is: America’s favorite things.
I searched for:
peanut butter
black ink pilot pens
summer rain storms with rainbows at the end
love affairs
french-pressed coffee
All I saw were various breasts attached to similarly shaped/hued women wearing strings and strips of fabric.
Tomorrow night, I undress my mind and attempt to translate an array of memories and movements in a show called: ejaculating beauty
For over a year, this performance piece has been formulating on various sheets of paper, and within these past few months, I have begun to fully understand its meaning.
What is my first memory of beautiful?
Growing up, it was always about my hair, which was slightly less red and what some may have defined as…….dirty blond. It was long and curly, and had I not been so restless, I may have had a future in shampoo commercials.
My grandmother begged me never to cut it. But. If I ever did, to save it and give it to her.
Strangers would tell me how beautiful my hair was.
Everyone wanted to touch it.
I was being upstaged by my follicles.
So, I did what any sane person would do, remove the part of me that got all the attention.
I thought: If my hair is gone, they will notice my words more.
When I cut my hair, something shifted in me. I realized I had been hiding behind it. Once it was gone, all of me was visible. Or, it felt that way. So, I began to cut other parts of me in order to sever the screams on my skin that only I seemed to notice.
None of this was very helpful.
A lover tells me I am beautiful, but this word has been so misused that it is difficult to gather up its intentions and accept it.
Airbrushed faces on magazines and billboards are called beautiful.
That woman on the 4 train with exposed bones and belly, flatter than the paper I write on, is called beautiful.
I call the earth beautiful, sometimes.
On days where trees reenact a Pina Bausch movement.
That moment she found a heart-shaped rock on the beach in western B.C., amidst thousands of others.
The feeling I get when first drip of coffee teases my tongue and slides down my throat.
This is beautiful to me.
I am trying to be visible in a way that re/defines what beauty even means.
I am covered in mosquito bites.
Beautiful?
(I’ve been told) one breast is slightly larger than the other.
Beautiful?
I’ve got freckles on my skin from too much sun and not enough sunscreen.
Beautiful?
I’m emotional and unsettled and moody.
Beautiful.
Aimee Herman 