Swan

Written as an AP English assignment, inspired by a painting by Andrew Atroshenko.

When I look at myself, I am not beautiful.
My feet are twisted and gnarled like the wood of an old tree.
My limbs are gangly and thin.
My eyes are too large,
My hair is too straight and too dark,
And my breasts are too small.
In the mirror each day, I cannot tell myself I am a radiant woman.
But when the music starts, I shine.

The notes hit me like rays of the setting sun, and every hue of grace and passion is splayed across
The folds of my dress,
The arch of my back,
The curve of my ankle,
The stretch of my throat.
Each harmony, each crest and fall of sound and feeling
Is a wave that breaks over me,
And I am lost.
I drown in emotion, in the distinct expression of self that only movement can allow,
And in that moment, I forget beauty.

I forget love and hatred and pain and joy, and as I forget I am freed.
I forget because they no longer belong to me.
I have given them to the melody,
To the dance which draws them out of me like venom-
The next move, fraught with the tension of 'goodbye forever',
The next turn, spun by the unraveling of my heart,
The next leap, lent weightless wings by the joy of a first kiss,
The next slow reach carved from the desperation of 'it's all my fault'.
As they leave me, they become me, crashing down on the audience I've also forgotten, burning the bright after-image of my soul into the shadows of theirs.

I have never seen myself beautiful.
I have never looked. I have forgotten to look.
For when the music hits me, it turns me in on myself, and I can see nothing but my own spirit- a shower white hot of sparks-
And the cascade of the notes in folds of velvet against my mind.

I have never seen beautiful, but I have felt it.
It feels like a smooth silk shoe and blisters on my feet,
It feels like the trickle of sweat along my brow and the stab of muscle cramps in my legs, and the scrape of hairpins and sequins.
It feels like breathlessness when the curtains open.
It feels like the worn wooden stage upon which my heart may bleed all it wants.
For it does, it gushes, and it is the ugliness of passion.
It is terrifying, it is raw, it is light-starved and beaten, it is all I have.
And when I get up on a stage, people call it beauty.