Beautiful

A face in the mirror; a gentle head tilt; a naked, swan neck.

Her fingers find the soft of her collar bone and drift upward: chin, cheek, forehead— every part of her, delicate. Like a bird, she thinks. The mirror shows her nothing new, and yet everything has changed.

Everything.

Because for the first time in her life, her beauty becomes her. This time, it hasn’t found her through the hungry eyes of a man, or through the careless words of a well-meaning shop assistant.

It’s found her from the softness of all that she is.

So this,

she thinks,

is what beautiful really feels like.