It's so easy to think of something as beautiful. The flowers, the bees, the sky just before the sun disappears or comes back to us. The ocean is beautiful, the ways stars dance around an open galaxy above, the f*cking sky and everything under it is just beautiful. And that is okay. But what about us? What about me? My skin is sleepy in the morning and my eyes remember closing for eight hours but can’t seem to remember waking up. My smile is crooked and my second toe is longer than my big toe, so is my big toe even my big toe?

How could I have come from stardust and not grown to shine against darkness? I wonder if the stars know they're beautiful. How could they not? They don’t feel insecure when we point and stare at them or when they burst into flames and fall from their glory. A shooting star is on fire, fleeing from life and out of control, but the flash of failure is its beauty.

Some days I feel beautiful while others I feel like Ivy. There shouldn’t be a difference. When he calls me beautiful I imagine that it could be a lie, but that is the ugly way to think. Beautiful is a word you don’t lie with. If someone says a thing is beautiful, they are talking about the whole raw, unforgiving thing. When someone calls you beautiful, they are talking about the way you shine and dance around darkness like a shooting star. They are talking about the way you are your own small galaxy made of your thoughts and laughs and memories, functioning to be you and only you. Beauty is no longer a thing that you have, it is a feeling. And when we feel beautiful, we are as beautiful as the sky and the stars and the world around us. We feel, therefore we are.

So, come to the mirror and look at yourself; see how the stars stare at their reflection in oceans. Motionless, naked, and deaf to judgment. Remember that no star has felt the feeling of someone calling it beautiful. Live and breathe in this world among the people who look at you and wonder who you are and what you're made of and you will know you are made of stardust. Know that you are beautiful.