She looked at me once, eyes searching, and asked the question that has undone stronger men than I:
“Do you think I’m beautiful?”

I said no.

The word felt too small, too borrowed, too worn thin by careless tongues. Beautiful is what strangers call sunsets and strangers call faces in passing. It is polite. It is surface. It is safe.

So I reached instead—slowly, reverently—and let my fingertips trace the curve of her cheek, the soft map of her jaw, the fragile line where skin meets the beginning of a smile she hadn’t yet allowed. I held her gaze and spoke the truer thing:

“There is no single word large enough to carry what you are.
Beauty is only the doorway.
What lives behind it—the light that shifts when you think no one is watching, the quiet courage in the way you carry old hurts without letting them harden you, the way your laughter arrives like it’s surprised even you, the stillness you bring to a room just by breathing in it—none of that fits inside language.
It spills over every edge we try to draw.
It is vast. It is ancient. It is yours alone and still somehow generous enough to let me stand inside it for a moment.”

I leaned closer then, forehead to forehead, breath mingling, and whispered against her skin:
“You are not beautiful.
You are the reason the word was ever invented—and found wanting.”

Ancestral Healing