Dear Beautiful - another love letter term 2 project

I can't believe I haven't posted for so long, but there's been a lot of travel and I haven't really been able to stay in one place long enough to perfect something to put up. I started so many things in the last few weeks but never properly finished any of them! There will definitely be more things posted in a few more weeks.

For our term 2 project we were supposed to redo a journal entry from term 1. That was really hard for me. I had some okay ideas but they never really worked out. In the end I had to fall back on an oldie but goodie - another love letter to a stranger. Well, I shouldn't really say "fall back" because it's more like fall forward, she was so inspiring for some reason. So here's my term 2 project, "Dear Beautiful"...

Jan 30, 2013

Dear Beautiful,

I know we’ve never met properly, but today when I see you at the Cambie and Broadway bus stop with your long straight hair the most beautiful coppery silk, and your pale porcelain face blushed blood-pink from the wind, and your wide ashy eyes a tiny bit stained with liner, you seem so lovely and delicate; I can’t help feeling protective of you. It is moderately cold out and you are wearing a low-cut white lace shirt and dark grey cardigan under your unzipped anorak, and no scarf, but you don’t even shiver. You seem so deliriously beautiful, so lovely, so radiant. And yet I’ve never seen a girl with your youth and beauty so solemn and silent.

When the bus comes it is very crowded, and we wait, trying not to be washed away by the jumbled waves of people pouring out onto the sidewalk, until we step into the warm dense people-smelling vehicle.

We sit facing each other. I doubt you see me through the sea of people gripping onto the ceiling poles and trying not to trample each other’s toes, manoeuvering their backpacks one-handed as the interior traffic swishes and slides along the aisle; yet I see beneath your jacket, half-covered by a grey sweater-sleeve, on your right wrist red marks like scorched cow-brands. Half a dozen sleek red half-healed scars on the outside of your wrist –

An angel is before me. In her round smoke-haloed eyes I see youth, and all that it entails. In her beautiful painted eyes and white chest I see a child and a woman. She is as broken and precious as art itself.

Despite your beauty you don’t know who you are. But in you is the world, everything that lives and grows and struggles, everything beautiful and conflicted. Beauty and youth will bless and break you. You will cause yourself great suffering and epiphany.

The bus slows stops and someone trips and steps on my foot. We both apologize, him for stepping on me, me for being in his way. When I look up again you have stood up quietly, waiting for the tide to carry you off into the grey cold. Like a ghost you disappear. Will we meet again in the afterlife?

I hope that one day you’ll be able to read this and forgive me for trespassing. And if we ever do meet again, at the bus stop or a coffee-shop or a second-hand bookstore, I hope by then you’ll have learned to understand how, in these few moments, I can’t help loving you.